A Car's Life: Sparky's Big Adventure
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 "Sparky, Cut that out!"
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"The only big thing about this is how big of a waste of time it is. This is one of those movies that you want to show your kids when you want to punish them for something. The animation sucks, the voice acting sucks, the story sucks, the character designs suck, the music sucks, and it feels three times longer than it actually is."
— Bobsheaux
A Car's Life: Sparky's Big Adventure is a 2006 American direct-to-video computer-animated comedy-drama film written and directed by Michael Schelp and produced by his company Spark Plug Entertainment. It was released on November 21, 2006. It is the first installment in the (A) Car's Life series. An untitled sequel removing the letter "A", Car's Life 2, was released in 2011.
Synopsis
Sparky is a young red sports car who loves to go on adventures and never listens to his dad, Fender. After going to a dangerous spot, Sparky learns the moral of the movie: Always listen to responsible people.
Plot
After Sparky and Fender visit their cousin Piston's grave, they visit their home, the "Gas-N-Go". Sparky going into a car wash after a long argument, meanwhile one of Fender's employees, Speedy, causes some mishaps, like causing a pile of tires to fall, accidentally smearing motor oil mistaken for wiper fluid on a purple Hummer's windshield, who is named Bumper. and giving another customer a flat tire, and giving the said customer the wrong tires, she almost quits. After getting washed, Sparky meets a sketchy jeep named Diesel. Diesel then tells Sparky if he wants to be cool, he should go to an auto repair and car decoration shop named "Auto Swag". After "tricking his ride", Fender gets angry at Sparky and grounds him. Diesel then tells Sparky to go to a drive-in movie called Hot Rod Heaven. While the two watch the movie at the theater, Sparky falls asleep. Then some gas-sucking parasites named "gas leeches" then steal some gas from him. Sparky then confronts the leeches, and they surrender. The next day, Officer Clutch then tows Sparky to the gas station. Diesel then tells Sparky and Speedy to go to the Badlands (a place with no rules, no speed limits, and where the annual Champion's Cup is held.) After racing for a little bit, Sparky and Speedy then rest. The aforementioned gas leeches then suck the gas out of the two cars. Diesel then holds them hostage using a parking boot. A mutant tow truck that somewhat acts like a monster named Igor then wrecks Speedy into pieces multiple times. Sparky then tries to escape, but Diesel then holds him down. An unnamed police car (whose name wasn't revealed until Car's Life 2 as "Officer Clutch") then fires a rocket launcher into Diesel with a lack of an explosion at all for some odd reason, and the police car tips Diesel over, freeing Sparky. After Speedy is shown to be alive and taken to the body shop to be fixed, while Diesel and Igor are taken to prison, Sparky, Gracie, and Fender (with Norbert riding in him for some strange reason) then race to the highway.
Why It's NOT a Big Adventure
- First of all, the whole film and title is an obvious rip-off of Cars and A Bugs Life, because it was released four months after the actual film came out in cinemas and it feels like this was only made to just cash in on the success of that movie. Even though the story is different from the actual Cars, many characters bear resemblance to a lot of characters from the actual Cars film(s), especially specifically Sparky to Lightning McQueen and Fender to Doc Hudson, respectively.
- Speaking of which, they even made three sequels, which were released in 2011, 2013, and 2015 respectively solely just to cash in on the Cars sequels.
- The plot is extremely dark for a kids' movie since it involves the cars going to their relatives' grave (Piston) who was murdered by an anonymous car, and it soon reveals at the end that the girlfriend of the relative (Diesel) was the one who killed him.
- If you didn't notice before, the film was produced, written, directed, and even animated by only one person, Michael Schelp, which is very lazy and pretty much a huge red flag; the same may even go for the next three sequels.
- Now, there are many features that were done by one person, including The Mokey Show which was all done by Sr. Pelo., which worked better.
- Most of the characters in the movie are poorly written at best and are unbearable to sit through with
- The titular protagonist, Sparky, is extremely whiny, bratty, and annoying throughout the entire movie as he's just an annoying stereotype of a child who thinks he's grown-up when he's not; unlike Lightning McQueen from Cars, who gets character development later in the film, Sparky does not get that much character development in this film aside from learning not to trust strangers, making him somewhat one-dimensional.
- Speedy is also insufferable and very annoying too. She is an obnoxious girly-type character who is often whiny and over-excited about everything; her voice is also very annoying too, sounding more like a squeaker and poor man's version of Amy Rose from Sonic X or Angelica Pickles from Rugrats.
- Poorly integrated beginning, as absolutely nothing happens during the scene other than Sparky doing lots of dumb and stupid tricks, and most of the ones he does are very unrealistic, including Sparky literally jumping over a pothole, and driving through and even doing circles around the cactuses!
- Most of the voice acting is pretty bad, especially by Speedy, who is absolutely unbearable to listen to since she squeals and yells almost every time she speaks.
- Even Bumper has such an irritating voice as well, and her moaning is annoying to listen to.
- Some of the names of the characters are quite dumb too. For example, Sparky's last name is simply Car as briefly mentioned in the beginning by asking him to slow down, or it was probably aliased by Fender, which is a lazy last name. By this movie's logic, Scoop from Bob the Builder would be named Scoop Digger instead.
- Mostly every scene is almost the same, so there for you can re-edit the order of the film and it would be the same.
- Some of the scenes are a bit mean-spirited. An example is a scene after Sparky gets "upgraded" and shows his father the tune-up. Fender is mad, but he does calm down and accepts Sparky's apology. The two then laugh a bit, only for Fender to tell Sparky that he's grounded after that, which is out-of-nowhere and a bit of a harsh thing to say after forgiving and accepting someone's apology.
- While it is true that Sparky did deserve it for being dumb and doing something that extreme, that's still a bit harsh for Fender to say that off the bat.
- Abysmally bad CGI animation and poor-looking textures with dull and ugly colors, which is unacceptable, even for 2006 standards. It almost compares itself to the animation in the following other media. For example, Jay Jay the Jet Plane, Fireman Sam since season 6, Foodfight!, any film that was animated by Vídeo Brinquedo or Xing Xing Digital.
- In addition, even most of the ground colors have a bad texture. For example, most notably the stained light grey ground.
- The lip-syncing for when the characters speak can look off-putting at times.
- There are even repeated sequences and reused animations throughout the movie, which is just plain lazy. For example, Gracie laughs in the same tone multiple times, and it feels like the same clip was used, Norbert's head moving two times, and Speedy yelling "CALM DOWN!!!" two times again.
- There is even a variety of animation errors found throughout the entire film too:
- When Sparky lands hard after the pothole jump, his wheels are not in motion. Then he is seen driving sideways and saying "Sweet!".
- Furthermore, despite Fender running into Sparky after he drove sideways during the pothole jump, they both get collision detection, yet there's no visible wreckage at all, despite that Speedy does have actual wreckage near the ending.
- When Bumper finally stops and finishes driving in reverse after the last two minutes, her rear left tire easily clips through the wheel well.
- When Sparky is about to get tuned up from the Auto Swag, Diesel's front right hubcap offset changes itself automatically for a few seconds.
- Lance's wheels as seen also lose motion too.
- Speedy's front left wheel rotates itself automatically rapidly after Norbert emits fire from his hose.
- Speedy's boot also clips a bit through the ground when Diesel attaches it on as well.
- There is also a long non-stop infinity lasting for more than 10 minutes, as no one ever even blinked, and their eyes constantly stay open when the one gas pump named Norbert at the Gas & Go (although name not revealed until Car's Life 2) is set on fire.
- While technically not an error, there are actual tire squealing/screeching sound effects programmed into the film. However, there are oddly no tire smoke effects animated to them.
- There aren't even any tire skid mark effects either in the film as well.
- There's also no smoke effect when Sparky (or anyone else) drives on the desert sections.
- This film was made in 2006 by the way, and previous animated/CGI/anime films made before A Cars Life (e.g. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Disney's/Pixar's Cars which as stated in the #1 segment, came out four months before this film, Over the Hedge, Curious George, Flushed Away and Arthur and the Invisibles) look TEN TIMES as better than this.
- There is also a variety full of countless plot holes found throughout the entire film:
- How could Speedy not notice she was using oil instead of wiper fluid first, but Norbert did notice it after?
- What could've caused Norbert to fire from his hose?
- Why couldn't Sparky tell Fender that the Auto Swag and drive-in moments were set up by Diesel?
- Why couldn't Speedy and Sparky use the robot arms seen in the other cars to get off their parking boots?
- Why didn't the two notice Igor head for them?
- Why Diesel did kill Piston in the first place, and why does she also want to kill Sparky and Speedy?
- How could Norbert manage to take his ride into Fender when there are no humans?
- Why does Officer Clutch have a rocket launcher?!
- On that topic, despite it looking like a rocket, why doesn't it explode when it hits Diesel?
- How did Speedy somehow survive when she got chopped into pieces?
- Why did Igor just stand there when Officer Clutch arrived? He could've made a sneak attack on him as the latter gave Diesel a ticket.
- Although Julia is an air pump, then how come she didn't inflate the dark blue car customer's rear left flat tire? Did she not notice him and Speedy?
- Why did Sparky keep his modifications if he hated them?
- On that topic too, near the ending, he states that he would want to ditch his modifications back to the Auto Swag, but in the sequels, he is still shown to have them stay on.
- Speedy says "What a pretty shoe!" in one scene. If this is a universe entirely populated by cars (who don't wear shoes), then how did she know what a shoe is?
- Misleading title and synopsis: Despite the film being titled "Sparky's Big Adventure", and its synopsis, he does not even go on a big adventure at all.
- Lots of scenes in the movie often rely way too much on filler, which makes the movie even more boring.
- Poor dialogue: Most if not all, the characters talk like they're reading from a script paper. Some of the dialogue is also annoying, like when Fender keeps shouting "Sparky!", and the scene where Sparky was playing with Gracie, Fender was about to shout "Sparky! Shut up!", despite this latter coming across as somewhat funny.
- There's also even one accidental wrong non-sense use of dialogue in one scene, when Fender shows Sparky the grave of Piston and calls Diesel "that old bucket of bolts", Fender says that it's getting late, even though it's still broad daylight, which makes no sense at all. It's even more infuriating when you realize that there is a scene that happens after that time, he and Sparky go to the gas station and they say, "Good morning!" to everyone.
- The character models are atrocious to look at and the designs for the characters are lazy and ugly, it tries to go for a Bob The Builder or even more of an Auto-B-Good-esque style by having the characters' eyes on the headlights instead of the windshield, but unlike in Bob the Builder and Auto-B-Good, which used their concepts well due to the machines and cars in the two aforementioned media being designed well with the only exception being the poor redesigns in the 2015 reboot in the case for Bob the Builder, but the way that they designed the characters in this movie look terrible and they fail miserably with the said concepts.
- Most of the character models are also pretty lackluster too. For example, Sparky has his mouth where his grill (nose) should be, Speedy has a strange outline on her mouth, giving off an impression that she has a mustache despite being a female, and how could Gracie nor Officer Clutch have turn signals on the grill if their bumper (mouth) would chew them?
- According to the synopsis and the back of the DVD's cover art, the story is supposed to be "inspired by a true father-son relationship", which is not true.
- The soundtracks are boring to listen to and are so loud that it's hard to hear what the characters are saying, most notably the beginning's main theme. Not only that, but its also music score is a poorly scored 10-second music track played on a loop throughout its entire 40-minute runtime. The soundtrack where Sparky and Speedy catch up to Diesel in the Badlands is kind of dark, creepy, and scary, but it's much quieter.
- The soundtracks are also reused a lot throughout the entire movie.
- Some of the attempts at humor in this movie fall very flat and are hard to laugh out of, such as the scene where Diesel gets a ticket, but not for attempted murder, but for driving without a license.
- Not only does this joke fall flat due to it being completely unfunny, but it also makes zero sense because driving is the only way that the cars in the movie can move, so realistically, Diesel gets a penalty just for simply moving.
- Half of the characters are completely useless and don't contribute to the plot, most notably Gracie, Sparky's sister, and Julia, the air pump, who barely gets any screen time at all, and only has one line, being "Good morning!".
- There are a handful of gender confusion characters, for example, most notably Gracie (Sparky's sister), and Diesel (the main antagonist) due to both their name and appearance, you would think that they would be a male, but Gracie is just a female, and Diesel is a female villain. However, you wouldn't be able to know they are female unless you heard their voices, but even Diesel's voice sounds too boyish as well.
- Despite it being supposedly a children's film, most of the elements are way too dark and scary for a U (Universal-rated) film:
- Diesel is a stereotype of a person (or car still) that seems cool but has different intentions, and she is way too obsessive that she is going to be the bad guy of the movie, even though this movie was made for "kids".
- There is a scene where Diesel smokes, despite the theme of smoking not being appropriate for young children.
- At one point, Fender pushes Sparky into the car wash when he refuses, with Sparky saying, "Child abuse!" in protest, a very dark term for family/kids' movies.
- Some death scenes are even shown on-screen. For instance, they showed Speedy getting chopped up by the tow truck named Igor who's one of Diesel's minions, which is extremely disturbing, and even her death cries are painful to listen to as well.
- There is an extremely pointless scene where Speedy is "helping" a purple Hummer customer, Bumper, as well as a scene where Bumper accidentally states that she's "blinded" after Speedy uses oil, which was mistaken for wiper fluid at first, even though Bumper's eyes are not on her windshield, but rather on her headlights, just like all of the other characters.
- Just like in the actual Cars movies, there is some confusing logic in this film too. For example, how do convertibles get washed up, if that would've destroyed the interior of the car? Or how do the cars smoke if the wipers are just basically their hands, and why is it not positioned towards their mouth?
- Some stolen strange elements are present in a later film too. Sparky, Norbert, Fender, Diesel, Gracie, and Speedy are just very recently reused models from Spider's Web: A Pig's Tale of their same colors. Unlike this film, no other colors of any one of them appeared in the said film.
- Even the desert roads were stolen from the same movie.
- Something also worth noting is that the said film was released on the same date as the first Car's Life film, which could explain the rehashed elements.
- Bland and uninspiring climax, it's nothing more than a Sparky and Speedy torture moment as Diesel captures them and has Igor attempt to kill them.
- The ending of the film is awful, and it leaves off with an aforementioned joke that makes no sense; Officer Clutch gives Diesel a ticket and arrests her (along with her partner) not for murdering Piston and chopping up Speedy, but due to her... driving without a license.
- On top of that, the ending credits' font is written in Comic Sans, which is just very lazy.
- The trailer for the movie is abysmal. It's just a compilation of clips from the movie with no epic music, text, or narrator to make it feel like an actual trailer.
- It feels more like a preview disguising as a trailer rather than an actual trailer.
- Even Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go and most (if not near to all) other bad media in existence have trailers that feel like trailers!
Redeeming Qualities
- A few moments are funny, such as the scene where Fender finely crashes into Sparky with Fender saying "Your bumper's fine, it's your brains I'm worried about. Stop doing that!", the scene where Sparky is about to sing, only for Fender to barge in and break the fourth wall by saying "This is not a musical!", and as well as the scene where Fender says "Sparky! Shut up!".
- There are some unintentionally funny moments too, such as when Speedy shrieks GAS LEECHES!!!.
- Despite being a stereotype of an overprotective father, Sparky's father, Fender, is a semi-likable character, since he's one of the few characters with any understanding of common sense.
- Besides him, Norbert, the gas pump, and Julia, the air pump, are also likable characters, despite Julia sadly only having one line, and a two-time close-up of a short appearance, as she does not appear in the next three films.
- It may be questionable, but the scene when Sparky is playing with his little sister Gracie by trying to make her laugh is somewhat heartwarming.
- The Badlands scene was somewhat exciting to watch, but it's sadly ruined by the many plot holes and dark scenes.
- The scene where Speedy is "killed" can be funny and satisfying due to how annoying she is. Unfortunately, it is revealed that she survived.
Reception
A Car's Life: Sparky's Big Adventure received overwhelmingly negative reviews from audiences and Cars fans alike. It remained obscure for a while, until many YouTube critics, including Bobsheaux, PhantomStrider, I Hate Everything, and a few others made reviews on the movie, they critically panned it for the horrible CGI animation, poorly written characters, subpar voice acting, and the strangely dark elements that are thrown in. IMDb currently rates the film at only 1.2/10 and Letterboxd currently rates it at 1/5.
Videos
Trailer
Full Movie
Reviews
Trivia
- This is the only film in the Car's Life franchise to have the letter "A" in the title.
- Also, A Car's Life 2 is the only Car's Life sequel ever to not have its title.
- As mentioned above in the plot, the police car's name was not expected to be revealed until A Car's Life 2, is named Officer Clutch, where in this film, it was either unknown, Sparky and/or Fender barely did not quite catch his name, or he hasn't got his name himself then.
- Like the Cars universe, as mentioned in plot hole #4, there are no humans in this film either.
- Besides that, however, there are two known animals seen, like the bird during Sparky's pothole jump and the Auto Swag scene, and a turtle in the sequel.
- Corinne Orr also voices Gracie in the sequels and the Grand Prix female announcer in Speed Racer.
- Fender's actual name is not mentioned in this film. He is always referred to as "Dad".
- However, he was also called "Daddy" sometimes.
- While Otto was not completely revealed until the sequel(s), he is barely in this film, as you take a listen to his background voiceover, if you notice it.
- Fender, Bumper, Diesel, and Piston (despite his death) are one of the few characters to be named after car-related terms. Fender, the part of a car's wheel well, Bumper, a front structure equipped onto all cars since 1904, Diesel, a type of fuel, and Piston, the part of an engine.
- The Badlands is heavily based on the Bonneville Salt Flats.
- The Badlands name could also be a reference to the 1990 game or Badlands National Park.
- Unlike in Cars, the characters use the windshield wipers as their hands, rather than as their tires.
- Sparky is the only character in the sequels to not have a much different voice actor in the sequels.
- In Car's Life 2 and its sequels, there is a character named "Lug Nut", which was somewhat a character of the same name from The Little Cars in the Great Race and also its sequels too as well.
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