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Cars is a 2006 animated feature film produced by Pixar and directed by both John Lasseter and Joe Ranft. It was the seventh Disney/Pixar feature film, and the final film by Pixar before it was bought by Disney. Set in a world populated entirely by anthropomorphic cars and other vehicles, it features the voices of Owen Wilson, Bonnie Hunt, Paul Newman, Cheech Marin, Tony Shalhoub, John Ratzenberger, George Carlin, Michael Keaton, and Larry the Cable Guy, as well as cameos by several celebrities consisting of Bob Costas, Darrell Waltrip, Jay Leno, Michael Schumacher, and Mario Andretti.

Cars premiered on May 26, 2006 at Lowe's Motor Speedway in Concord, North Carolina and was released on June 9, 2006 to generally favorable reviews. It was nominated for two Academy Awards, including Best Animated Feature, and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film. It was released on DVD in late 2006 and on Blu-ray Disc in late 2007. Related merchandise, including scale models of several of the cars, broke records for retail sales of merchandise based on a Disney/Pixar film, with an estimated $1 billion in sales.

Unlike most anthropomorphic cars, the eyes of the cars in this film were placed on the windshield (which resembles the Tonka Talking Trucks, as well as the characters from Tex Avery's One Cab's Family short and Disney's own Susie the Little Blue Coupe), rather than within the headlights. According to production designer Bob Pauley, "From the very beginning of this project, John Lasseter had it in his mind to have the eyes be in the windshield. For one thing, it separates our characters from the more common approach where you have little cartoon eyes in the headlights. For another, he thought that having the eyes down near the mouth at the front end of the car made the character feel more like a snake. With the eyes set in the windshield, the point of view is more human-like, and made it feel like the whole car could be involved in the animation of the character." The characters also use their tires as hands and feet, the exceptions being the various tow truck characters who sometimes uses their tow hooks, and the various forklift characters, who use their forks.

The original script (called The Yellow Car, about an electric car living in a gas-guzzling world) and some of the original drawings and characters were produced in 1998 and the producers agreed that Cars would be the next movie after A Bug's Life, and would be released in early 1999, particularly around June 4. However, that movie was eventually scrapped in favor of Toy Story 2. Later, production resumed with major script changes.

In 2001, the movie's working title was Route 66 (after U.S. Route 66), but in 2002, the title was changed to prevent people from thinking it was related to the 1960 television show with the same name. Also, Lightning McQueen's number was originally going to be 57 (Lasseter's birth year), but was changed to 95 (the year Toy Story was released), the number seen in the movie today.

Cars was originally going to be released on Friday, November 4, 2005, but on December 7, 2004 the movie's release date was changed to Friday, June 9, 2006. Analysts looked at the release date change as a sign from Pixar that they were preparing for the pending end of the Disney distribution contract by either preparing non-Disney materials to present to other studios, or they were buying time to see what happened with Michael Eisner's situation at Disney. When Jobs made the release date announcement, he stated that the reasoning was due to wanting to put all Pixar films on a Summer release schedule, with DVD sales occurring during the holiday shopping season.

Cars is the last film worked on by Joe Ranft, who died in a car crash in 2005. The film was the second to be dedicated to his memory, after Corpse Bride. This is also Paul Newman's last movie before he retired in 2007.

The international versions of the film have some English text replaced by text in the local language. For the DVD it becomes the language that you choose upon inserting the disc. It's the first Walt Disney Animated Feature dubbed to Ukrainian language. The replaced text includes for instance the "Cars" movie logo, Doc's newspaper clippings, the "Closed" signs in Los Angeles and the "Lead lap" text during the last race. The Russian title of the film is "�¢�°Ñ‡�º�¸" (TAh-chki), which translates to "wheelbarrows," and is in common usage as a slang term for cars.

Nine of the songs on the soundtrack are by popular artists, as the last eleven are instrumentals by Randy Newman. The album was released by Disney Records on June 6, 2006.

Cars opened on June 9, 2006 to generally favorable reviews. William Arnold of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer praised it as "one of Pixar's most imaginative and thoroughly appealing movies ever", and Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly called it "a work of American art as classic as it is modern."

However, some critics expressed that Cars did not hold up to the standard of other Pixar films, especially after the acclaim received by The Incredibles, Pixar's previous film. "The movie is great to look at and a lot of fun," wrote critic Roger Ebert, "but somehow lacks the extra push of the other Pixar films." Laura Clifford of website Reeling Reviews wrote that the film's "only real drawback is its failure to inspire awe with its visuals and to thoroughly transport with its storytelling."

Rotten Tomatoes gave Cars a fresh 76% (with an average of 6.9) and it earned a 73/100 on Metacritic, both the lowest attributed to a Pixar film. In its opening weekend, Cars grossed $60.1 million, lower than previous Pixar films such as The Incredibles and Finding Nemo. In the United States, the film held onto the #1 spot for two weeks before being surpassed by Click and then by Superman Returns the following weekend. It went on to gross US $461,981,604 worldwide (ranking #6 in 2006 films) and $244,082,982 in the U.S. (the third highest-grossing film of 2006 in the country, behind Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Night at the Museum). It was the highest-grossing animated film of 2006 in the U.S., but lost to Ice Age: The Meltdown in worldwide totals.

Cars had a highly successful run during the 2006 awards season. Many film critic associations such as the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the National Board of Review named it the best Animated Feature Film of 2006. Cars also received the title of Best Reviewed Animated Feature of 2006 from Rotten Tomatoes. Randy Newman and James Taylor received a Grammy Award for the song "Our Town," which later went on to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song (an award it lost to "I Need to Wake Up" from An Inconvenient Truth). The film also earned an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, but it lost to Happy Feet. Cars was also selected as the Favorite Family Movie at the 33rd People's Choice Awards. Perhaps the most prestigious award that Cars received was the inaugural Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film. Cars also won the highest award for animation in 2006, the Best Animated Feature Annie Award.

Cars was released on DVD in both wide-screen and full-screen editions on October 25, 2006 in Australia and New Zealand, on November 7, 2006 in the United States and Canada and on November 27, 2006 in the United Kingdom. It includes the short films Mater and the Ghostlight and One Man Band, as well as Inspiration for Cars, a 16 minute long documentary about Cars featuring John Lasseter, the director. It also had a version of the Pixar short Boundin' as an Easter Egg. According to the Walt Disney Company, five million copies of the DVD were sold in the first two days it was available.

Unlike previous Pixar DVD releases, there is no two-disc special edition, and no plans to release one in the future. According to Sara Maher, DVD Production Manager at Pixar, John Lasseter and Pixar were preoccupied with productions like Ratatouille,. Additional extras not seen on the DVD have since been released on the official DVD website.

In the US and Canada, there were bonus discs available with the purchase of Cars at either Wal-Mart or Target. Wal-Mart featured a Geared-Up Bonus DVD Disc that focused on the music of the film, including the "Life Is A Highway" video, The Making of "Life Is A Highway", Cars: The Making of the Music, and Under The Hood, a special that originally aired on the ABC Family cable channel. Target's bonus was a Rev'd Up DVD Disc that featured material that was mostly already released as part of the official Cars podcast and focused on the inspiration and production of the movie. A two-disc edition was available from Australian retailer EzyDVD, but the second disc did not contain any animation information.

On November 6, 2007, Cars was released on Blu-ray.

John Lasseter has said that the idea for cars was born after he took a cross-country road trip with his wife and five sons in 2000. When he returned to the studio after vacation, he contacted Michael Wallis, famed Route 66 historian. Wallis then led 11 Pixar animators in rented white Cadillacs on two different road trips across the route to research the film. Throughout the trip, the animators collected items they found by the roadside, like wheat, thistles, snake skin, and road kill. They attached the items, which they called "Okie hood ornaments" to the cars and at the end of the trips, they buried them in the desert during a ceremony.

For the cars themselves, Lasseter also visited the design studios of the Big Three Detroit auto makers, particularly J. Mays of Ford Motor Company. Lasseter learned how real cars were designed.

Computers used in the development of the film were four times faster than those used in The Incredibles and 1,000 times faster than those used in Toy Story. To build the cars, the animators used computer platforms very similar to a real carmaker's.

The track on which the opening race (Motor Speedway of the South) takes place is actually based on an enlarged version of the real life Bristol Motor Speedway. The venue for the Piston Cup tiebreaker race (the Los Angeles International Speedway) is a conglomeration of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the Arroyo Seco in Pasadena where the Rose Bowl is located, as well as the California Speedway in Fontana. The landscape in the background behind Radiator Springs is made up of rock formations intentionally reminiscent of Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas. The road map shown in the montage history of the town calls the area "Cadillac Range." Some of the mountain peaks in Cadillac Range, shown during the movie, resemble the quarter panels of late-50's Cadillacs, with their distinctive tailfins.

One Pixar tradition is to create one trailer for each of their films that contains no footage from the actual released film. The trailers for this film:

• Mater accidentally hits a little bumblebee while driving, and when Lightning McQueen tells him to forget about it, McQueen hits a swarm of bees. Mater laughs at his misfortune.

Marcus Aurelius Canônico of Folha de S. Paulo described The Little Cars series (Os Carrinhos in Portuguese), a Brazilian computer graphics film series, as a derivative of Cars. Canônico discussed whether lawsuits from Pixar would appear. The Brazilian Ministry of Culture posted Marcus Aurelius Canônico's article on its website.

It has also been noted that the plot of Cars bears a striking resemblance to that of Doc Hollywood, the 1991 comedy which stars Michael J. Fox as a hotshot young doctor, who, after causing a traffic accident in a small town, is sentenced to work at the town hospital, falls in love with a local law student and eventually acquires an appreciation for small town values.

A sequel has been announced for a Summer 2012 release, simply titled Cars 2. Disney has confirmed that Brad Lewis will be the director. On April 9, 2008, John Lasseter commented "the Cars are going international" in the sequel. Cars will become the second Pixar film to have a sequel, after Toy Story.

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