So after only two years of talking about getting a bigger car, we finally got all of our ducks in a row and went out on a Tuesday night and bought a 2008 Mazda5. We left on vacation three days later and oh goodness, it was the right choice. We came home with a bunch more stuff than we left with, and despite that, we could still see out the back window! Crazy!
The best way I can describe this car is that it's a cross between a minivan and a station wagon. It's about the same size and cargo space as a station wagon, but has a third row that can be folded up when grandparents are visiting. While I don't think I'd like to go on a three-day road-trip with six people in the car, it did work fine for trips to the beach as long as the short people were in the back row. It also has passenger doors like a minivans as well as seats that are higher up. I'm really enjoying not having to lean down to buckle children in.
One weird thing is an odd mix of really sophisticated and really cheap features. For instance, the heating system allows us to set a target temperature, and the car will adjust the fan as needed to get to the target. On the other hand, the headlights don't turn on automatically, so for the first time in nearly ten years, we have to remember to turn on the headlights when it starts to get dark and turn them off when we get out of the car. There are other small amenities lacking, like no power outlets. It's odd. But all in all, we're pretty happy.
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K is a big fan of the Pixar movie Cars, so it was a given that we would take her to see Cars 2, especially since it was coming out right after her birthday. We wound up seeing it twice - I took just her on a weekday afternoon when Alec was at the babysitter, and then she really wanted to take my mother to see it, so we all went while we were in Michigan.
I should say that overall, I liked it very much. It's funny, a good spy movie parody and of course has fantastic animation and all of the little fun Pixar touches. There are ways I liked it a lot more than the first movie, since sports movies tend to bore me and I couldn't actually predict the entire plot of this movie from the first ten minutes unlike Cars.
That said, there's something about Cars 2 that really bothers me.
Big spoilers ahead for Cars 2
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The main villains in the movie are lemons: models of cars like the Ford Pinto that have terrible motors and parts and break down all of the time. It's really not a wonder why lemons would become bitter enough to become villains. Everyone, including the heroes, views them with utter contempt and feels free to make fun of them to their faces and discriminate against them.
I recognize that the cosmology of the Cars world doesn't bear close examination, since it's about as tightly knit together as a chain-link fence. Still, it's hard not to see how creating a world where characters with bodies that don't work well are worthless and objects of contempt doesn't send a message - intentional or not - about disability and people with disabilities.
The thing that really bothers me is that it's really unnecessary to the story. These days, simply owning an oil company makes you a villain and the prospect of sitting on a huge oil deposit while not wanting the world to turn to alternative fuels is plenty of motivation for the plot. How the lemons deal with how they're viewed by others is clearly set up to contrast how Mater comes to accept himself for who he is despite how he is viewed by the rest of the world, but it's not really a good comparison. It's clear that Mater has always been accepted and valued in Radiator Springs and it's only once he spends, what, a week in the outside world that he realizes people see him as an idiot and maybe 24 hours elapse between that realization and his deciding he can like himself anyway. Compare that to spending your entire life being treated like that and being discriminated against. Also, Mater has spent his life towing lemons around and feeling superior to them, so he's not really in a position to tell them he knows just how they feel. It's sort of like saying, "Well, I've always been tone-deaf, so I totally know what it's like for you to have spent your life in a wheelchair!"
I'm fairly certain that Pixar didn't want to send the message that people with physical disabilities are worthless, but we often say things that send messages we didn't mean them to. I'm also much less willing to give a children's movie a pass on these things, because children are excellent at picking up subtext whether it's the subtext we wanting them to read or not, and unlike adults, they're still learning about society and peoples' places in it. Children with disabilities especially don't need to see a movie that sends that message.
I don't know. I don't have any ringing condemnations, just disappointment that Pixar once again has made an excellent movie with some stuff that really bothers me (I have some issues with The Incredibles as well). I'll probably still let K watch Cars 2 when it comes out on dvd and I'll probably spend a lot of time talking about disabilities to counteract it. It's not as satisfying an answer as declaring that we're boycotting Pixar forevermore, but more realistic.
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