Well. That was anti-climactic.
I feel like a knight who’s been on a quest to slay a terrible dragon for a decade only to arrive at the top of the mountain and find the dragon’s around the size of a chicken and died several years ago from old age.
In the early days of this blog I built up Planes as a personal bete noir, a movie I would never, ever review because it represented the worst of crass, merchandise driven movie-making for both Disney in particular and animation in general.
Oh my. How innocent I was. How innocent we all were.
But after years of the absolute garbage I have had to sit through for you people (love you all) it is with a heavy heart that I must report that Planes is…fine?
I mean, it is aggressively mediocre, don’t get me wrong. But, given the state of Disney’s output at present, there’s something refreshing about a movie that manages to hit a solid C.
In fact, I would say it was one of the most safely boring movies I’ve seen all year were it not for the fact that it’s set in the Cars universe and therefore is, as all movies in that benighted franchise are, weird as fuck.
WHAT KIND OF LIFE DOES THIS POOR CREATURE HAVE?!
The movie begins with two Air Force jets flying over the ocean and talking about Dusty Crophopper, the greatest flyer known to man weird anthropomorphised vehicle, with the kind of gushing, on-the nose-dialogue that tells you this is just a dream Dusty’s having from, like, the very second you hear it.
Sure enough, Dusty’s boss Leadbottom wakes him from his reverie and tells him to get back to work. See, Dusty Crophopper is a crop-duster (his parents wanted to name him Trismegistus Carruthers but you now how set in their ways people are). But, would you believe this rural small-town boy stuck in a dead end job has dreams of something greater? Of course you would, but that’s because you are savvy media-literate folks who’ve seen one, maybe even two, films. Nothing wrong with formula, I guess, but I’m kinda surprised Disney didn’t just forget the planes and crank out a crossover with Star Wars about a plucky X-Wing who goes off to fight the Empire.
The scene where he had to kill his new best friend was surprisingly heart-rending.
So Dusty wants to be a racer even though he’s not built for that and it’s actually damaging him when he exceeds his recommended maximum speed, something that is pointed out to him by his friend Dottie who is one of the little forklift people from the first two movies.
We need to talk about the forklift people because, well, there’s literally nothing else of interest to talk about this movie other than the utterly bizarre world-building. What are you expecting here? The Unshaved Mouse’s Analysis of Planes through the lens of Radical Queery Theory? It’s fucking Planes. Of course I’m going to talk about about the weird forklift people.
Ask yourself, how many forklifts have you seen today? Probably one or less, right? Unless you work in a forklift adjacent profession? Pretty specialised piece of equipment?
Well in the world of Planes, the forklifts have fucking taken over. They’re everywhere. I think there was an invasion and the old car-led order was violently overthrown. Spouse of Mouse pointed out that all the forklift people seem to be a labour class. I pointed out that they also seem to be running the military and also all the cars and planes are basically beasts of burden in this world and we can’t agree on who’s oppressing who (bit like our marriage, if I’m honest). If there had been this many of them in the first movie it would have to have been called Forklifts (And there are also a few cars for some reason). I can only imagine it’s because the animators decided that forklifts have arms and are closer to human proportions so it slightly explains why these living vehicles created a world that is very obviously designed for the human body.
Anyway, the plot, such as it is. Dusty spends his days crop-dusting by day and training by night for the qualifiers for the Wings Around the Globe Rally with his friend Chug, who’s a fuel truck. Chug suggests that Dusty gets some pointers from Skipper Riley, an old warplane who’s a World War 2 veteran.
World War 2 happened in the Cars universe?
I…
I have so many questions.
What kind of car was Hitler?
Obvious, in retrospect.
But Skipper turns Dusty down cold and the young crop duster has to race in the qualifiers without his guidance.
Anyway, we’re right at the point of this checklist masquerading as a screenplay where we’re supposed to meet our cocky douchebag antagonist. This is Ripslinger.
And I’m not saying he’s an obvious rip-off of Chick Hicks from Cars. I don’t need to. The frickin’ Disney wiki did it for me.
Sayin’ the quiet part loud, eh wiki?
Fuck’s sake Disney, not even going to give him a different colour?
Dusty competes and gives it his all, but, wouldn’t ya know it? He just fails to make the cut and doesn’t qualify. Well, I guess the movie’s over. But what’s this? One of the other planes was disqualified for using illegal fuel, which means Dusty qualifies by default right before the second act. Good job, Scriptotron 3000.
BEEP BOOP. SCRIPT PROGRESS AT 30%
I kid, but you know what? There’s some solid writing here. There’s a nice scene where Dusty starts to realise just how dangerous a flight around the world will be for a crop-duster. Skipper shows up and tries to talk him out of the race but Dusty insists on going saying that he’s sick of flying around the same field and “flying thousands of miles and never going anywhere”.
Impressed by his moxie, Skipper agrees to train this rookie and discovers the reason why Dusty always flies so low to the ground; he’s a plane who’s scared of heights.
Regardless, Skipper works with Dusty to improve his speed as a low-flying aircraft. Dottie buffs his engine and also offer to remove his duster to reduce drag, something the movie makes very clear is the equivalent of Dusty losing “the boys”. That’s not a joke.
Dusty travels to New York and lands at JFK Airport…FUCKING WHAT? JFK EXISTED IN THE CARS UNIVERSE AND (PRESUMABLY) WAS ASSASSINATED WHICH LED TO IDLEWILD BEING RENAMED WHAT?!? HOW DID LEE HARVEY OSWALD HOLD A RIFLE?! HOW DID HE GET UP THE STAIRS TO THE BOOK DESPOSITORY?!
Sorry. He lands at JFK Airport and meets his designated comedy sidekick (a Mexican plane named El Chupacabra) his designated love interest (an Indian plane named Ishani) and a stuffy British plane voiced by John Cleese in full “just put the money on the dresser and have your way with me” mode. Hell, even the designated comedy sidekick gets a designated love interest as El Chupacabra falls for Rochelle, a French-Canadian plane. Sorry I mean Carolina. Wait, no, Heidi. I mean Azurra. Sakura?
So one of the weirdest parts of this movie…no, I can’t justify that. One of the top fifty weirdest things in this movie is the character of Rochelle who was re-coloured, re-named and re-nationalised for a whopping 11 different internationalised releases. So she’s Australian in the Australian release, Brazilian in the Brazilian one and so on. And they did this because…I have no goddamned clue. Maybe Disneytoons just had a dream that every nation would get to see themselves represented as an overly sexualised plane. I know that’s my dream.
“Imagine aaaaaaall the people…”
The race begins and Dusty’s inability to fly high soon has him trailing the other racers but he starts to win them over with his unassuming do-right nature. As the race proceeds through India, Ishani takes Dusty on a tour of the Taj Mahal.
It has flight towers to show that planes built it even though it was probably built by cars even thought it would make no sense for them to build it and this entire world is like a nightmare I can’t wake up from.
Dusty tells Ishani that he’s worried about going over the Himalayas because of his fear of heights and she advises him to follow the train tracks instead. During the race, he follows the tracks only to find them lead to a tunnel. Unable to give up and unable to fly over the mountain, he does the sensible thing and just flies through the tunnel.
This ends up putting him ahead of the other racers and now he’s in the lead. But Dusty realises that Ishani set him up to fail and confronts her. He notices she’s sporting a shiny new propellor of a kind that only Ripslinger’s team uses and puts two and two together.
As the race continues, Dusty becomes a hero to vehicles all over the world who don’t just want to do what they were built for BY WHO?!?! FUCKING EXPLAIN HOW THIS WORLD WORKS YOU PIECE OF…
Sorry, sorry.
Ripsligner decides that he’s not losing to no stinking crop-duster and has two of his lackies clip Dusty’s navigating attenae while they’re flying over the Pacific. Dusty gets lost and is rescued by the USS Dwight D. Flysenhower and the various forklifts and planes that infest him like parasites on the hide of a whale.
On the Flysenhower Dusty is shocked to learn that his mentor Skipper only ever flew one mission during the war. Feeling betrayed and desperate to get back in the race, he leaves the ship, gets caught in a storm and crashes in the Pacific Ocean.
Dusty gets salvaged and as he recovers Skipper arrives and tells him the truth about the only mission he ever flew.
So, you know Thomas the Tank Engine? Did you know Thomas the Tank Engine could get incredibly dark? Like, there’s one episode where a train escapes the mass-scrapping of steam engines in England and it’s pretty much played like the dude escaped a concentration camp? Well, Planes now gives us a scene where we see Skipper’s entire squadron getting massacred by Japanese gunboats. Living, sentient planes just falling out of the sky in flaming ruins. It’s brutal and shocking and…honestly the best scene in this entire franchise. Although, keep in mind, I do loathe this franchise and that might be colouring my opinion somewhat.
Ha ha! Yes! Die! Die!
Dusty and Skipper reconcile and all the other planes chip in to donate parts to fix Dusty like he’s the Six Million Dollar Man, including Ishani who gives Dusty the fancy propellor she got in exchange for betraying him.
Dusty re-enters the race and starts to gain ground on Ripslinger. And, as always, you can probably predict all of the story beats right down to the photo-finish but I’ll say this in the movie’s defence; it’s a racing movie with good racing. The animation is lovely and the aerobatics are exciting to look at and you do get a real sense of speed. I mean, it’s not coming anywhere near my favourite animated racing movie but there’s an enjoyable competence to it all. Ripslinger and his goons try to hobble Dusty one more time but Skipper arrives in the nick of time to help Dusty escape them. Ripslinger and Dusty race for the finish line, Dusty wins, Ripslinger crashes into some portable toilets (if you recall, Cars 2 established that these vehicles piss oil) and the movie ends with all our couples paired up and a lucrative new stream of merchandising opportunities opened up for Disney and its affiliates and shareholders.
Don’t you just love a happy ending?
***
Scoring
How butt ugly is the animation? Is it as ugly as a butt?: 12/20
Cars has never been the gold standard for Pixar animation but, fair’s fair, it’s still Pixar. Disneytoons, the animated sweatshop that produced so much janky, direct-to-video garbage in the nineties actually acquit themselves very admirably. Judging on the animation alone, you’d think Pixar made this film and very few animation studios outside of the top-tier could achieve that.
Are the main characters jerks? I bet they’re jerks: 07/20
Dane Cook isn’t bad. I actually think I like him a little better than Own Wilson as Lightning McQueen. Absolute generic nothing of a part, but there’s no point where I felt he was actively bad.
Bet the villain’s a real shitpile, character wise: 04/20
Ripslinger is an actual villain, unlike Chick who was mostly just a douche. Not at all a memorable or charismatic villain but…reviewing this movie feels like reviewing a components based on the individual components. It’s like: the keyboard is not missing any keys. It is satisfactory.
Oh what’s this? Supporting characters? Fuck you supporting characters!: 04/20
Here’s where the movie does start to be actively annoying. When it tries for comedic relief, you just want to press a pillow down on its face and put it out of its misery.
Man, fuck the music. I hope it dies: 09/20
You know what, there’s parts of the score that are clearly aping Kenny Loggin’s Danger Zone and I’ll give points for that.
FINAL SCORE: 36%
NEXT UPDATE: 14th December 2023.
NEXT TIME: Yeah, I get pretty raggedy around this time of year too.
unshavedmouse 
I’m glad you really went in on the absolute bonkers lore implications of these movies. I can definitely agree they’re the most interesting part.
Next review is gonna bring back memories for sure.
I’ve never actually seen it. Very interested to see what all the fuss is about.
Hey Mouse,
You’ve got a double engined duplicate paragraph up there – the one starting with “Regardless”
Good review for a meh movie 🙂
Ah, thanks a million. WordPress has started crashing pretty reliably so I must have copy and pasted in a backup without realising.
*looks at next week’s review* Boy howdy, the Raggedy Ann and Andy movie sure is a movie. Don’t get me wrong: the animation is SMURGES, courtesy of the maestro Richard Williams himself. Some of the songs are catchy and a few characters are charming. The problem is that the plot itself is all over the place and it’s use of musical numbers is, er, excessive. You have to have a certain mindset to truly appreciate the film, one that could theoretically be achieved through use of controlled substances.
I’ve noticed a certain rise in people discussing the Raggedy Ann and Andy movie, which I attribute to The Amazing Digital Circus, particularly in how the character Ragatha takes obvious inspiration from the film. Coincidence? I think NOT! I wonder if Mouse has seen it. In the meantime, I’m still waiting for my poster (signed by creator Gooseworx) and my Pomni plushie to arrive before the end of the year.
Mouse has not seen in but anything by Richard Williams has my attention.
The Amazing Digital Circus is free to watch on Youtube if you are curious.
My theory for the whole Cars/Planes universe is still that it’s a sequel to Stephen King’s “Trucks”, and that all the buildings and such were constructed by humans before the vehicles worked them to death. The “evolved” cars have since adapted a few things and done some creative revisionist history about their roles in things…
Look it doesn’t make LESS sense than the idea that vehicles built an airport and renamed it JFK
I definitely think it takes place in the same universe as Pedro from Saludos Amigos and Little Toot from Melody Time.
I swear I’ve seen this film before, but, for my all straining, I cannot remember a single detail about it. If anything, I actively appreciate this review’s greater focus on the sheer clusterf*ck of pseudobiology and history that is the “Cars” universe, given my own years-long morbid fascination with its spectacularly convoluted workings: if a vehicle’s body design coincides with a nonfictional vehicle from the year of their birth (hence why, say, the late-middle-aged Doc Hudson is a car from the early ’50s in the first film), did no cars or planes exist in this universe before 1885 and 1903 respectively? Were the cars sentient horse-drawn carriages previously? If so, was the carriage alone sentient and how did it acquire the horse as a means of motion? Was the relationship basically parasitic (would the carriage somehow tap into the horse’s neurons and move and talk through it for convenience)? Were the horses “puppeteered” by the carriages to build most of these pre-1900 structures? If this occurred for millennia (if you thought a car building the Taj Mahal was a mindscrew, envision an army of realistic horses somehow pulling it off), why are there no horses in any of the film set in the present day – were the carriages and horses simply combined via science to “create” the first cars, making Lightning McQueen a cybernetic ungulate? GAAARRGH MY BRAIN.
On a mercifully-unrelated note, it’s great to here you’re finally tackling the Richard Williams Raggedy Ann film, it’s such a perturbing combination of saccharine kid’s storybook cliches, overlong musical sequences, non-sequitur plotting and jaw-droppingly spectacular animation (I’m particularly curious about your thoughts on the Greedy sequence, which surely must be one of the most unexpectedly-masterful pieces of animated art I’ve ever witnessed) that it makes a great antidote to the crushing monotony of “Planes”.
I kinda want to see a cartoon about stone-age wheels just rolling around and whacking each other with clubs.
I can only imagine that a scene where a group of wheels (with spears stuck through their centres) roll after and successfully hunt herds of mammoths and giant ground sloths (thus explaining the lack of biodiversity in the “present-day” Cars films) would probably cause my mind to selfdestruct from simultaneous confusion and joy.
I’ve seen the sequel to this film and quite liked it: I would also like to point out that CARS 2 explicitly depicts various vehicles armed to the teeth, so it’s far from impossible that Lee Harvey Oswagon was able to tool up before assassinating the local JFK (It’s equally possible that the local Kennedy assassination was a car bomb or some sort of crazy ramming incident).
Having said that, I feel that applying rigorous logic to a setting as cheerfully cartoonish as Wheel-world is as sensible as the late Robert Graves’ efforts to popularise his theories (I was tempted to type ‘Conspiracy Theory’) on the exact origins of the Greek Myths.
It’s all very intellectual, but it carefully and ruthlessly eliminates all the fun bits! (Mr Graves seems to have operated on the dangerous assumption that ramblings about mushrooms, human sacrifice and speculative frescos was worth quite as much of an audiences time as imagining a world with actual monsters, demigods and Olympian Prodigies!.
I still remember when you were reviewing the Cars movies 10 (!) years ago, and I suspected you were going to end off with Planes, so I watched it so I would understand the jokes and stuff. Then you reviewed Foodfight instead and ruined my plans. Nice to see that finally paid off.
He’s a crop-duster.
Why is he a crop-duster? Do planes, automobiles, aircraft carriers or forklifts require mass produce in order to live? Do they all run on biodiesel? Is there some other being or species not mechanically-based that requires crops for sustenance?
SOMEONE TELL ME HOW THIS WORLD WORKS!
Clearly Kennedy was killed by Lee Harvey Oldsmobile.
I saw this movie. I remember basically none of it. I recall being surprised it wasn’t actually done by Pixar though, so at least the animation was good, if utterly generic.
But the Raggedy Ann movie? That’s the opposite of generic. Can’t wait to read your thoughts on that.
Mouse, what are your thoughts on the Disney 100th anniversary short Once Upon a Studio?
I haven’t actually seen it, the trailer I saw looked rather unpromising.
Well, unlike Wish, this short has gotten nothing but a positive reception. Every comment I have read about it calls it a worthy way to celebrate 100 years. As I told you last time, you should/could make a review post of it as a companion piece to your Wish review. It’s fine, I can wait.
It is really good.
I actually watched this movie since you made a big deal out of it back in old reviews. I thought it was pretty charming. This is why waiting too long can take comedy out too. I was really mad at DisneyToons in 00s and early 10s when Disney animation reputation was in shadow of Pixar and DisneyToons made it worse. But now I think they have kind of nostalgic charm to them.
I don’t know how nobody has brought up that Ripslinger was played by Roger Craig Smith yet.
Let me say that again.
Ripslinger was voiced by SONIC THE HEDGEHOG.
Honestly, i’ll take a bad movie over a boring movie.