REVIEW: ‘Cars on the Road’ Is Fun But Goes Too Fast

Cars on the Road is a Disney+ Original series based on Pixar’s Cars franchise, starring Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) as they take a cross-country road trip east to Mater’s sister’s wedding. The nine short episodes each take on different tropes and genres with comedy, music, and classic Cars uncanniness.

Cars on the Road is a great premise on two fronts: a road trip in the Cars universe is simply the most obvious vehicle for a series you can concoct, and it’s a vehicle that allows you to showcase all kinds of different iterations of the uncanny Cars characters and settings. There are monster trucks and circus cars, salt flat racing supercars and cryptid hunting vans, and cars that run creepy hotels and trucks that haul food cross-country. Half of it makes no sense, like why are there endless fields of corn in a world where only cars exist? Dinosaur cars are shown to have once roamed the earth millions of years ago. It’s never like it’s too much, though. Every oddity may make you scratch your head, but the show is well aware of itself and passes everything off with ease. Who cares why cars need to sleep with a headboard behind them when there’s no bedframe? It’s just a funny little detail that makes the world feel more robust in the end.

Where I struggle with the show as a whole, though, is that it’s unclear exactly what tone it wants to set. Cars as a franchise is certainly geared towards younger kids. The original movie is rated G, but at least half of these episodes either deal with something spooky or something violent. Which isn’t a criticism of the show itself for designing those kinds of episodes. It’s just a matter of finding that the level of the dialogue and the action were both a bit more intense than I would have anticipated, given the tone of the movies.

I did also struggle a little bit with the length of the episodes. I don’t think that their short time necessarily impacted their quality outright, but I think that as a whole project, there was a level of character development opportunity missed by rushing through everything. The moral of most of the stories has to be told to the audience outright rather than letting it play itself out through characters learning lessons on their own, simply because there was not nearly enough time to demonstrate that growth on-screen. It felt like so many moments were being skipped over, and then chunky dialogue had to come and fill us in instead. It only a little bit took me out in the moment, and some episodes were worse about it than others, but as a whole, getting to just see those moments of growth instead of having to have them implied to me would have been nice.

Especially since the series is somewhat serialized. You can’t necessarily watch them out of order, as certain characters or references come back again later. Which, honestly, I think was a huge benefit to the show as a whole. It meant that even if some of the individual episodes’ growth moments felt undeserved, we do get to see cumulative growth over the nine episodes.

My favorite episode may have been “Trucks,” a musical number nearly the length of the episode where Mater learns to feel like he is as much a truck as any other truck, even if he’s a smaller kind. It feels the most complete as its own parable, the song is very fun, its dips into multiple animation and coloring styles, and it has good humor. Any time the episodes gave themselves the space to do things creatively and distinct from one another, which was nearly in every episode, the show shined its hardest.

The crowning examples of this were the few times throughout when different animation styles came into play. The whole show is animated excellently. Cars has never looked so sharp. They’re completely expressive and doing all kinds of funky things on-screen with dozens of designs we’ve never seen before. But to top off the excellent animation, a few different times, we see a completely different animation style for a short spell, and every time it looks just as excellent and helps create some really cool visual distinction episode-to-episode. As does the occasional use of completely different color styles or palettes. Despite taking a trip east, I don’t feel like the scenarios ever really found themselves in very diverse locales, mostly just the same desert as always, with a few exceptions. So these moments really stood out.

Cars on the Road is a good bit of fun held back by its too-short format. With slightly longer episodes, many of my qualms would likely be ameliorated entirely, allowing for better character development and conclusions by showing us rather than just through hefty dialogue.

Cars on the Road is streaming now on Disney+.