Owen Wilson and Larry the Cable Guy are returning to Pixar with Cars on the Road. The Disney+ series will be set in the animated franchise and center on Lightning McQueen and Mater as they venture to visit Mater's estranged sister for her wedding.
Alongside Wilson and Larry the Cable Guy, the cast for Cars on the Road includes Bonnie Hunt, Tony Shalhoub, Guido Quaroni, Cheech Marin, Jenifer Lewis, Lloyd Sherr, Quinta Brunson, and Dana Powell.
In anticipation of its arrival, Screen Rant spoke exclusively with producer Marc Sondheimer and directors Bobby Podesta, Brian Fee and Steve Purcell to discuss Cars on the Road, homaging Ray Harryhausen, and more.
Screen Rant: I'm excited to talk about Cars on the Road, I've been a big fan of the franchise since it first launched, and it's amazing to see you get to come back in this form. Now, I know with a lot of animation, especially Pixar, these projects can often take multiple years to sort of come together. When was the starting date for putting this together?
Marc Sondheimer: Yeah, well, streaming doesn't quite have the luxury of all the time that a feature has to make, or at least this project didn't. We made it in about a year, a little over a year, like 15 months.
What was it like having that shorter turnaround time for all of you to really find the stories, get the animation, and put it all together?
Steve Purcell: There's something really exciting about jumping ahead and making choices and running with them and not overthinking, because that is a possibility. When you're working on something for a long time, if you don't see that end date in front of you, sometimes you can kind of ruminate on something too much. It's like if you're doing a painting, and you keep mixing the colors up, and they come out brown because you've kind of scrubbed them together too much. So, sometimes, there's more vitality in making a choice and going with it and, and living with those choices.
Brian Fee: That's easier to do when you're so excited. I remember that how that made me laugh the first time I read Steve's pages, that really makes it easy to move forward at that speed.
So what were everybody's goals here in putting the show together to really be something gratifying for audiences as much as for all of you?
Bobby Podesta: I mean, one thing we talked about a lot was just to make this entertaining from first frame to last frame. Even our composer did variations on the theme song for every episode that are different in the style of that episode. If we're going to ask our audience to sit and watch 65 minutes, something that's longer than Dumbo, we want it to be super entertaining and packed as much in there as we can.
I love the Ray Harryhausen-style of animation used for the dinosaur flashback. How did that come about, did you have the idea for Harryhausen first, or was it dinosaurs came first, and then it was the challenge of figuring out that style of animation?
Steve Purcell: I think the style of it was part of the idea like, "Oh, yeah, first of all, I want to see what a Cars dinosaur looks like, and I want to see it animated like a Ray Harryhausen movie," because those were the things that sparked my imagination when I was a kid.
It was a challenge to figure out how to do it, because we're working in computer graphics, and so we have to find a way, a process, which they did very quickly, figured out a process that made you totally believe it was handmade. There was some cheating, as far as the frame rate and things like that, but ultimately, it was the feeling that we wanted to capture, and I thought they did it amazingly well. The production design had the lighting feel of it, as well.
Bobby Podesta: You want some little fun inside stuff? I don't know if it's useful, but so we turned off the motion blur, our crew turned off the motion blur, for the dinosaurs, because they're stop-motion, right? But not our characters, until our characters were picked up by the dinosaurs, because just like in Harryhausen movies, they turned into puppets, and then they also got turned off in motion blur, so it's those little things —
Steve Purcell: The level of geekery that most people might not even notice, but the ones who do notice, oh yeah. [Chuckles]
What would you then say was each of your favorite adventures to help put together for the screen?
Brian Fee: My favorite one is one that Steve directed, the haunted motel one called Lights Out. As a kid, I just ate up haunted house stories, I love them. So that one just touches me, just right takes me right back to being seven.
Steve Purcell: I was really pleased with how Brian's episode, "B Movie," came out, because it had a lot of wordplay and a lot of complicated twists and turns in it. I remember thinking, "This would be really hard to direct, I think Brian should do that one." It was great to get to be an audience member for that one.
Bobby Podesta: Process wise, I got to work really closely with our composer on the Trucks episode, and that was just an opportunity that I hadn't had any other time in my career, and that was just a joy to craft something so out there.
Marc Sondheimer: There are so many that I enjoy, quite honestly, each one of those I would use, but I'll go "Road Ramblers." The kind of absurdity of the situation and the world that we created, or the crew created, and these guys built was just fun, and it feels real, and it's a movie, of course, that I love.
Steve Purcell: When you're working on something like this, and you have multiple episodes that are all really different, sometimes that question does arise, like, "Oh, which is my favorite?" The challenge when you're in the middle of it is like, "If this was my favorite, how can I make this one over here kind of reach the level of my favorite as well?" So we're always kind of navigating how to bring everything up to the same level that we want.
Cars on the Road Synopsis
Pixar Animation Studios returns to the world of “Cars” with the all-new original series “Cars on the Road.” Episodes follow Lightning McQueen (voice of Owen Wilson) and his best friend Mater (voice of Larry the Cable Guy) as they head east from Radiator Springs on a cross-country road trip to meet up with Mater’s sister. Along the way, every stop is its own adventure, with outrageous roadside attractions and colorful new characters.
Check out our other interview with Cars on the Road star Larry the Cable Guy.
Cars on the Road begins streaming on Disney+ on September 8.