It's really not the finish line, is it?

There's something that we Filipinos should learn from 'Cars'-that to dream big, and to aim high, doesn't necessarily mean giving up the 'small-town' lifestyle we know we love. We should know this: It's great to reach the finish line, but do consider how you run the race, and who you take with you.

The pursuit of success has been on my mind a lot lately, especially since a couple of my friends and I have decided to give going into business a second, bigger shot. A firm believer in the saying "You've got to name it to claim it," I've made it a personal project to re-identify what's, well, it for me. And so it was a happy accident that I got to catch Disney-Pixar's "Cars."

Leave it to me to relate to an animated race car named Lightning McQueen, right? Not quite. Judging from the film's success, I'm just one of millions.

"Cars," directed by John Lasseter ("Toy Story," "Toy Story 2," and "A Bug's Life"), tells the story of Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson), a rookie race car one triple-tie-breaking race away from winning the prestigious Piston Cup. Like plenty of up-and-coming hotshots, however, Lightning is overly confident. No, scratch that. He's disgustingly full of himself.

On the way to the tie-breaker, one mishap after another finds Lightning in a dying, small, out of the way, hick town called Radiator Springs, where's he's trapped for a couple of days until he fixes the damage he somehow wreaked upon their main road. Any dying, small, out of the way, hick town is, of course, hell for any superstar-in-the-making. Pressed for, er, gas, however, Lightning has no choice to pull his load.

In Radiator Springs, a town on Route 66 that's a million shades away from its former glory, Lightning eats some humble pie, makes some friends, falls in love, and learns some valuable lessons-just in time for him to pull his version of a grand victory in the Piston Cup.

In a way, the story of "Cars" is the most predictable among all seven Pixar animated films, but its beauty, really, is in the telling. The first-rate animation makes it look as if it's not animated at all, with the race (and car crash) sequences as breathtaking as any real race (and car crash) I've seen on the sports channels.

The characters are Pixar-charming and funny. The humor is, as usual, witty. It didn't take more than the first ten minutes of "Cars" for me to know that the guys at Pixar have done it again-they've somehow managed to inject heart into something technically astounding.

Another thing that I really like about Pixar films (I know, I know-it's Disney-Pixar now) is that there's always some kind of moral of the story that's so engagingly conveyed that it appeals to children, their parents, and those of us in between.

An added bonus is to hear a new side of Tony Shalhoub (that's Adrian Monk to fans of the television series). He voices the Ferrari-crazy Italian wheel dealer Luigi. Speaking of Ferrari, yet another bonus (as if the film wasn't already good enough) is hearing Michael Schumacher do a vocal cameo as a-what else!-Michael Schumacher Ferrari.

I was expecting some sort of "let's go back to the basics" ending, the way Sally Carrera (the "holy Porsche!" and Lightning's love interest, voice by Bonnie Hunt) chose to leave her hotshot lawyering life in the city to run an inn in the middle of what-used-to-be-somewhere nowhere. I find that a bit too unrealistic and impractical for my taste-if you take out the fact that one day some knight in shining (red) armor did come and bring the town back to life-but thankfully, Lightning's own choice was to keep his newly-learned values in check even as he continued to pursue his glamorous, high-flying dream.

Now that's something we Filipinos should learn-that to dream big, and to aim high, doesn't necessarily mean giving up the "small-town" lifestyle we know we love. I mean, we should know this: It's great to reach the finish line, but do consider how you run the race, and who you take with you.

A call for contributions

Speaking of aiming high, my friends and I at Cozy Reads Publishing are looking for original works of short fiction with "heartbreak" as the theme for our first book collection. Stories should be 6 to 10 pages long, encoded on MS Word, in 12pt Times New Roman, double-spaced. Email us at [email protected]. Oh, and we will pay. Flex those writing muscles, people!

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