Planes
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 A lazy rehash of Cars, but only set in the sky.
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Planes is a 2013 American 3D computer animated sports adventure comedy film produced by Disneytoon Studios and released by Walt Disney Pictures. Directed by Klay Hall, it is a spin-off to the Pixar's Cars franchise as well as the third installment overall, despite not being produced by Pixar, which is commonly confusing made by people who watched the movie, though the film was co-written and executive produced by Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios' then-chief creative officer John Lasseter, who directed the first two Cars films. The film stars the voices of Dane Cook, Stacy Keach, Priyanka Chopra in her Hollywood debut, Brad Garrett, Teri Hatcher, Danny Mann, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Roger Craig Smith, John Cleese, Carlos Alazraqui, Sinbad, Val Kilmer, and Anthony Edwards.
Like many of Disneytoon's films, it was initially set to be released as a direct-to-video film, but was instead premiered on August 2, 2013, at a special screening at The Fly-In Theater at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh (an annual gathering of aviation enthusiasts in Oshkosh, Wisconsin) and theatrically released on August 9, 2013, in the Disney Digital 3D and RealD 3D formats. A sequel, titled Planes: Fire & Rescue, was theatrically released on July 18, 2014.
Plot
Dusty is a small-town plane who dreams of one day competing as a high-flying air racer. However, poor Dusty has two strikes against him: He's not built for racing, and he's terribly afraid of heights. To achieve his dream, Dusty turns to naval aviator Skipper. Skipper helps Dusty qualify to take on Ripslinger, the race circuit's defending champion. Dusty's courage faces the ultimate test, as he takes aim at heights, he never dreamed were possible.
Bad Qualities
- The main problem with this movie is that its story is poorly executed, seriously overused and almost similar in structure to its predecessor, Cars, with many characters acting as rip-offs (or have similar traits) of characters from the Cars films. This was probably made just to sell more pointless merchandise and toys inspired by the film, which ironically was one mentality that Cars 2 was accused of being produced with.
- The story is ludicrously predictable, where if you hear just one sentence of the synopsis, that being "a plane with a fear of heights enters a race", you can instantly guess how it ends.
- Unfunny and weak humor.
- The scenes where Dusty races against many of the planes are blatant stereotypes of their countries. Even Cars 2 never pulled up such feet on making every foreign character blatant stereotypes.
- The voice acting, while decent, can get annoying at times, particularly Dane Cook as Dusty Crophopper.
- Some of the dialogue is stupid.
- Plot holes, like how did Dusty survive the train tunnel from the dark, even though he was nearly killed by the train, during the race.
- There is a lot of filler in the film (with practically nothing happening in the film) just so they can hit the 90-minute mark, with the side plots being the worst offenders.
- The characters are very one-dimensional, boring and extremely forgettable. Sadly, even in its sequel Planes: Fire & Rescue, the characters again are still one-dimensional:
- Dusty Crophopper, while likable, is the airplane equivalent to Lightning McQueen and is a generic “rookie who wants to win” and predictably wins at the end.
- Skipper Riley, while also likable, is nothing more than a mere Doc Hudson rehash.
- Chug is basically Tow Mater, but more annoying than the actual Mater himself. His design makes it even more obvious Disney wants him to be the next Mater.
- Dottie is like Sally Carrera, but as a forklift who has no purpose but the mere “voice of reason” of Dusty's friends.
- Ripslinger, the main antagonist, is a terrible villain. He tries to kill Dusty for no reason other than to win the race, who is more of a “spoiled legend who wants to keep his fame” than the villain. He also is another airplane rip-off of Chick Hicks, except that he isn't as really entertaining as a villain as Chick himself.
- Though to be fair, he does get some comeuppance when Skipper confronts him, as well as when he loses to Dusty in the final lap and when he flies past the public bathrooms, which caused him to get dirty, stinky and publicly humiliated.
- Ned and Zed are just really dull and stupid comic relief sidekicks of the villain that can get extremely annoying at times.
- The film uses many clichés such as Skipper saying he was a “legend” who went on many missions, only for Dusty to find out he only went on one. Another cliché it has, as stated above, is a seriously overused story about the “Underdog who wants to be the champion and gets to be it in the end mixed with the dreamer template, except the characters are vehicles, and in the sequel, he is treated like a celebrity. It has so many clichés to the point where it is so predictable that it's like what Nostalgia Critic said in his Disneycember review, you can predict it after gathering up one sentence of the plot: 'A crop-duster named Dusty wants to be a world-famous racer.' and unless you are very imaginative, you are able to guess what is going to happen pitch perfectly. For how stupid Cars 2's plot was, at least it was so stupid to the point where it actually is very unpredictable.
- In fact, there is a scene when they lampshade the predictable story by talking about the Underdog story by the main villain (Ripslinger) and his henchplanes (Ned and Zed).
- Also, the designs just look ugly by how uncanny it looks. What made the designs the Cars films, look so good (even great) is that it perfectly blends the human aspects with vehicular aspects. Here, it is like they just copy pasted human features in plane models and made it their character design. Besides that, the character movements are unexpressive. In the Cars films, when they move sad, happy or angry, they move depending on the expressions. Here, they move the same no matter how they feel.
Good Qualities
- Despite some of the character designs and movements being poor, the animation is still great and nice, especially by DisneyToon standards for Prana Studios; it also makes the backgrounds look appealing.
- In addition, the lip-syncing is still well-done.
- The idea of making a vehicle film similar to Cars was pretty interesting, just poorly executed.
- Amazing racing scenes.
- The action and some other scenes are actually awesome, like the very ending.
- Dusty and Skipper are likable characters (despite Dusty being a one-dimensional and Skipper being a Doc Hudson rehash as previously mentioned). In fact, Skipper is actually a well-developed character, unlike everyone else (especially Ripslinger).
- Not all of the racers are stereotypes of their countries, much like Cars 2.
- The soundtrack has plenty of bangers. A few highlights include the scores by Speed and Bad Boys composer Mark Mancina, "Nothing Can Stop Me Now" from Mark Holman and "Fly" from Jon Stevens.
- The scene where it shows Skipper's flashback to World War II is a really intense moment, as it shows that Skipper was the only plane in his squadron to survive being shot down.
- The voice acting is at least decent, despite that it can get annoying at times as previously mentioned above on BQ #5, like Stacy Keach as Skipper Riley or Danny Mann as Sparky.
Reception
Critical response
Planes received generally negative reviews from critics and audiences, with many saying that it makes Cars 2 look like a masterpiece in comparison. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reported a 25% approval rating with an average rating of 4.60/10 based on 122 reviews. The website's consensus reads, "Planes has enough bright colors, goofy voices, and slick animation to distract some young viewers for 92 minutes -- and probably sell plenty of toys in the bargain -- but on nearly every other level, it's a Disney disappointment." Another review aggregator, Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 top reviews from mainstream critics, calculated a score of 39 based on 32 reviews, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". However, the film earned an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale from audiences polled by CinemaScore.
Box office
Planes, despite negative reception, grossed $90,288,712 in the United States and Canada, and $148,970,000 in other countries, for a worldwide total of $239,258,712, and was a box office success. The film opened to number three in its first weekend, with $22,232,291, behind Elysium and We're the Millers. In its second weekend, the film dropped to number four, grossing an additional $13,388,534. In its third weekend, the film dropped to number five, grossing $8,575,214. In its fourth weekend, the film stayed at number five, grossing $7,751,705.
Videos
Trivia
- Planes is based on a concept created by John Lasseter.
- Along with the special screening of the movie, Disney brought a real-life Dusty to be part of the activities. The real-life version of Dusty was an Air Tractor AT-400A piloted and owned by agriculture pilot Rusty Lindeman.
- In the Brazilian version, the Canadian character Rochelle was replaced by a Brazilian plane called Carolina Santos Duavião. The name is a reference to Santos Dumont, the Brazilian aviation pioneer. The character was voiced by Brazilian singer Ivete Sangalo, and the paint scheme of the character and its name on the score boards were modified to reflect this change. In this version, Brazil has two planes participating, since there is another Brazilian plane in the race, that uses number 16.
- Blu-ray bonus features include "Franz's Song", an alternate sequence produced exclusively for the Blu-ray and HD digital releases, the featurette "Klay's Flight Plan", which follows director Klay Hall's personal journey during the making of the film, two deleted scenes with introductions by the director and producer, character interstitials, and "Top Ten Flyers", a countdown of history's greatest aviators hosted by Colin Cowherd.
- Val Kilmer and Anthony Edwards were previously played as Iceman and Goose in Top Gun.
- Disney Interactive released Disney Planes, a Nintendo-exclusive video game based on the film, on August 6, 2013. It was released on the Wii U, Wii, Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo DS. Even the sequel released its own game too, and is available again on the same platforms.
- Planes 3 was initially going to be a planned direct sequel to Planes: Fire & Rescue that was set to be the third installment in the Planes film series, a spin-off to the Cars franchise by Pixar. It was originally going to be released on April 12th, 2019. But then, it was removed from the release schedule following the shutdown of DisneyToon Studios.
- Jon Cryer was initially announced as the voice of the main protagonist Dusty, but later dropped out and was replaced by Dane Cook. A modified version of the teaser trailer for the film (featuring Cook's voice in place of Cryer's) was released on February 27, 2013. Cryer did however receive credit on the film for "additional story material", along with Bobs Gannaway.
- This was the first Disneytoon Studios film released theatrically in North America since Pooh's Heffalump Movie eight and a half years earlier in 2005.
- This movie, like Cars, had a bunch of rip-offs/copycats of this movie which are Wings (Ot Vinta 3D) a 2013 Russian rip-off of Planes, it even had its own sequel titled Wings: Sky Force Heroes (2014), Being a rip-off of Planes: Fire & Rescue, another one called The Adventures Of Petey & Friends (2016) and Planes With Brains (2018).
- The writers made a conscious effort to not remake Cars in a new setting, rejecting ideas that were too close to ideas in Cars while reusing the characters Skipper and Sparky from Cars Toon episode "Air Mater", with Stacy Keach and Danny Mann reprising their roles. The team also conducted research by interviewing several pilots of plane types that were included in the movie.
External links
Planes at the Internet Movie Database
Planes on Rotten Tomatoes
Planes on Metacritic
Planes on Letterboxd