John Scalzi is an award-winning science fiction writer.A question this week about last weekend's number one film: My husband and I went to see Cars 2 this weekend (it's cute) but are now having a difference of opinion about what genre of film it is. I say that talking technology means it's science fiction. He says talking cars with no evidence of humans ever existing means its fantasy. Who's right?
Hmmm. Well, strictly from a marketing point of view, it's neither a science fiction nor a fantasy film; it's a Pixar animated film, which is its own category -- and its own highly desirable category, since the average domestic box office gross of the previous eleven Pixar films is just under $260 million dollars, and even the runt of the litter, A Bug's Life, racked up over $160 million. The Pixar brand is so useful that even those films from the company that are unambiguously science fiction -- The Incredibles and Wall-E -- weren't marketed as such; they were marketed as Pixar films. This isn't a complaint, mind you, and even if it were, Disney (which now owns Pixar) would be right to ignore it. Its job is selling its film effectively, not satisfying genre purists.
With that caveat out of the way, and with the additional caveat that things are about to get supernerdy up in here, let's look at Cars 2 (and its predecessor, Cars). The filmmakers at Pixar, as far as I am aware, have been mum about how anthropomorphized automobiles have become the dominant species on the planet, so we're going to have to do some speculating. Here are the scenarios as I see them:
It's not that hard to make the leap from where we are today to full autonomous, self-driving, self-aware automobiles that have outlived their initial purpose of ferrying about human beings -- whose cultural preferences and bias they would still continue to exhibit without knowing why, or even that they are. Whether the humans are gone due to their own hand or due to, say, an automotive uprising in which Skynet and Lightning McQueen are mashed up into the most adorable autopocalypse ever, is perhaps best left unexamined at this point. The point is, if this is the scenario, then the existence of the cars has a rational basis, and the Cars series of movies is indeed science fiction.
Scenario Two: The Cars movies take place in a world where some celestial Henry Ford or Karl Benz reached down from the sky and with a touch of his finger animated the (necessarily metal-rich) mud into the very first cars. In this world, humans never existed, which makes the general morphology of the cars a little puzzling, and which makes one wonder if automobile philosophers (of which there must have been some) ever theorized as to why they all had spaces inside them clearly designed to convey some sort of creature from one place to another.
No doubt there is a rich vein of automotive teleological debate that has been engaged in over the millennia on just this subject, none of which reaches us the viewers because in the films we're following the adventures of an arrogant jock and his genial but dim best friend, neither of whom is what you would call the deeply introspective sort. Which is fine; no one expects a Pixar version of A Man For All Seasons, featuring cars. Be that as it may, in this scenario, the Cars movies have a non-rational and magical basis, and would be fantasy.
Scenario Three: The Cars movies take place neither on earth nor on a planet watched over by a mystical creator, but rather on a planet where the processes of evolution have given rise to a metal and internal combustion-based form of life, the predominant form of which just happened to (and unbeknownst to them) mirror to an unsettling degree the design of automobiles found here on Earth, not to mention the parallel cultural development. The details (and fundamental likelihood) of such an evolutionary and cultural path I will leave to others to discuss, except to say, hey, it's a quantum physics universe and anything can happen. In which case, the Cars films are neither science fiction nor fantasy, but simply contemporary action comedies.
There's a fourth scenario, in which the Pixar filmmakers simply said, "Hey, talking cars are cool!" and gave little if any thought about where the film could be slotted, in terms of the science fiction and fantasy genres. But come on. That's the unlikeliest scenario of all.
