Lightning McQueen drives like a rookie who has never needed anybody, and for a while the trophies back him up. One win stands between him and the Piston Cup, and then a wrong turn on the way to California strands him in Radiator Springs, a Route 66 town the interstate stopped feeding years ago. The locals want the road he tore up put back. He wants out by morning.

John Lasseter directs from a script he wrote with Joe Ranft and four other hands, and Pixar slows this one down on purpose. Long stretches sit still: desert light moving across rock, a neon sign warming up, a main street remembering the traffic it used to get. Owen Wilson gives McQueen a salesman's chatter and Paul Newman answers it with gravel and patience. The town and the racing circuit fill out around them, voiced by Larry the Cable Guy, Bonnie Hunt, Tony Shalhoub, Cheech Marin, George Carlin, Michael Keaton and stock car driver Richard Petty.

Small viewers get the color, the crashes and the slapstick, and the race scenes read clearly long before a child can follow a plot. The adult in the room gets the other half, a comedy about a place that lost its reason to exist when the highway moved. Low on peril, warm rather than sharp, and easy to put on for a four year old.