Cars 2

Larry the Cable Guy (or LTCG, real name Daniel Whitney) is a "Redneck" comedian, a member of the American "Blue Collar Comedy Tour" foursome, the star of the LTCG: Health Inspector movie, and a former radio personality. His pseudo-Southern accent and grating vocular style apparently enchanted Pixar, which designed a self-glorifying comic vehicle ("Mater") for him in Cars, the 2006 movie co-written/directed by John Lasseter.

The least satisfying of all Pixar's profitable productions, packed with only a few good gimmicks (such as racing enthusiast Paul Newman's voice) rather than the usual well-rounded animated characters, Cars was a noisy, colourful bore. Lasseter, clearly passionate about automobiles and grass-chewing hicks, gave the go-ahead for a TV series (2008-10) of ear-grinding mind-numbing one-joke shorts pun-painfully entitled Cars Toons: Mater's Tall Tales.

Getting back into a director's chair, the Pixar/Disney mastermind has now churned out Cars 2, also in 3D and IMAX versions. Its major virtue is its revelation that even Pixar is not an infallible movie-making genius. Technically, its 12th production is great to watch, but the concept's inherent CGI mission impossible is making a car's lights and grill represent an interesting, touching animated character. Working with similarly limited "faces", Pixar succeeded with robots in Wall-E; on Cars, not.