Drive My Cars Page 2

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Select the game from the main menu, and as the movie plays, a bar across the bottom of the screen shows five characters you have to search for within the scenes. As he clicks away at the controller, trying to rack up points, Lasseter explains what's going on. "If you see one of the characters pass - and there's an indicator that tells you when you've missed one - you get to select it. When you miss one, you've got to go back. Hit Rewind, and it'll jump back 1 minute in the movie. It doesn't tell you where the character is; you just know that in the last minute, you missed it. Once you've collected some characters, you unlock them, and each one has a name and a little paragraph about it. This has never been done before. And you can't do it on anything other than Blu-ray."

While it's definitely not Halo 3 - and doesn't pretend to be - Lasseter is proud of what his creative team has accomplished here. "I think it's the most extensive extra that's ever been done for home video, ever, where you take the movie and then explore it in a deeper way. We sit around, people who've been around this film forever, and we enjoy playing this."

Since Pixar's films do appeal to all ages, the Cars Blu-ray disc has separate sections for kids and adults. "This was like a real epiphany I had: For children up to a certain age, our films don't seem 'made.' The characters actually exist for them. So to have a guy in a Hawaiian shirt sitting there on their Cars disc talking about the making of the film is like, 'Who's that guy? Why is he there?'

"So we decided to let you make this decision right at the beginning. The kids don't have to worry about the 'making of' stuff. On their side of the menu, you have games like the Car Finder - you can do all sorts of fun stuff over there. For them, it's like the world of the movie actually exists." Lasseter now clicks over to the disc's "adult" section. "But you come over here, and now you can look at how the movie was made. This is like a storyboard we have at Pixar and the way we pitch things. We made the cursor look like the pointer for a pitch board."

Lasseter selects his commentary track - and in a moment, there he is onscreen, as big as life. "Like I said, I've been a huge fan of commentaries for a long, long time. And this is a way to take commentary and make it so that - Look! I'm wearing the same shirt!" He jumps up in his seat, gesturing and beaming. "It's me! How about that - we're wearing the same shirt!"

Settling back in, he shows off the dashboard-like Cine-Explore navigation bar across the bottom of the screen. "With Blu-ray, it's almost like you're watching the movie and a documentary about it at the same time, which is really fantastic. So, instead of just having a commentary where you're watching the movie and hearing the voice, when I say, 'Oh, on our recent trip on Route 66, there's this one thing that happened,' you can bring up a picture of it. Or you can stop the movie and go off and watch a little piece of video and then come back."

Disney/Pixar's Cine-Explore interface lets you customize how you check out the extras. With the Manual mode, you can choose documentaries, deleted scenes, and so on as they become available while you watch the movie. Auto mode gives you the whole tricked-out Lasseter-driven experience.

A lot of the dazzling sophistication of Pixar's movies comes from their sheer density - the way there's always something going on that you didn't notice the first 10 times you saw the film. And Lasseter clearly relishes all the ingenious details he and his collaborators have carefully woven into Cars - details that become much easier to savor on Blu-ray.

Watching the scene where Lightning McQueen is brought before town justice Doc Hudson, Lasseter seems as astonished as I am by what can be seen in the frame. "What's exciting for me as a filmmaker is that this is the resolution we made the film at. So it really feels like you're watching it straight from Pixar. Just look at the clarity of this. Fantastic. The amount of data in the image is staggering.

"When you get used to seeing things at this higher resolution, you can't go back. I think Blu-ray is worth having for that alone. The difference between VHS and DVD is nothing compared to the difference between DVD and Blu-ray as far as the image quality goes. Especially when you watch a Pixar movie where it was digitally-direct - wow, the picture is just so, so much better."

Lasseter becomes more and more excited as he spots gem after hidden gem. "There's so much in the background of this movie. Notice the wood beams. They're actually supposed to be made of wood, but they look like car guardrails and streetlamp posts." Since the paintings on the courtroom wall - which are barely noticeable on DVD - come across crisp and clean on Blu-ray, Lasseter takes me on a gallery tour. "This is Stanley, the founder of the town, with the gold tooth. This is great - this is Heaven. It's an old factory in the sky with all the Cars coming out of it. On the other side, there is Blind Justice, which is a blind tow truck holding the scales. Look at the clarity of that!"

For Lasseter, Blu-ray is clearly not a gimmick or a marketing tool, but a new, and pretty much untested, creative vehicle he can't wait to take out on the road again to see where else it takes him. "We've been working on this version of Cars for well over a year - since even before the movie was finished - looking ahead to when Blu-ray would come out. We knew we wanted to create this, so we were really excited, but we wanted to wait until the technology settled down. As we get used to what we can and can't do with Blu-ray, it's the same thing as with computer animation: It gives us more ideas. I always say that art challenges technology, and technology inspires the art. With this disc, the art was challenging the technology. The more we get to know about Blu-ray, it's going to inspire us to do great things that we can't even think of right now."

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