Saturday, November 10, 2018

Cars

I recently re-watched Cars.  Since the last time I saw it a number of years ago, I started learning Italian, and I wanted to see how much of the Italian in the movie I could understand.

I also noticed a few visual details that I'd missed before.  Near the beginning of the movie, as part of the in-world Racing Sports Network program, the point totals of Strip Weathers, Chick Hicks, and Lightning McQueen are shown, with lines linking the data boxes to the cars, but the line for Chick Hicks isn't as centered as those for Weathers or McQueen:


The skewed line visually represents Hicks' skewed outlook; he's focused only on himself.

I also started wondering if Hicks' number is related to the expression "to eighty-six it," meaning to throw something away.  I couldn't develop an argument for this, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

An-other small detail I noticed is the Latin motto above the door in traffic court in Radiator Springs:

Justitae via strata veritate

I translated this as: A road of justice leveled by truth.

Here's how I parsed it:
Justitae - noun, 1st declension feminine, genitive singular - "of justice"
Via - noun, 1st declension feminine, nominative singular - "road"
Strata - perfect passive participle from sterno, sternere, stavi, stratum - nominative, feminine singular - "leveled"
Veritate - noun, 3rd declension feminine, ablative singular - "by truth"

Appropriate to the world of the movie, this motto uses a road as a metaphor.

Guido's name is also something of a hidden reference.  As a regular word, guido means "I drive" in Italian; it's from the verb guidare.