Animated Antic Disney is a company that always manages to release great animated movies. Both Walt Disney Animation Studios and Pixar are two of the biggest and best animation studios to exist and have put out gems that will last for years to come. With that said though, Disney has released an animated stinker every once in a while. Not every studio is perfect and every company is prone to release a bad movie every now and then and "Planes" is without a doubt, a bad movie. This film is a spinoff to Pixar's successful "Cars" franchise although it's not made by Pixar but rather another lesser known animation studio at Disney and it's obviously a cash grab. How do I know this? Well, the film was initially meant to go straight to DVD, but the executives at the company must have seen dollar signs in their eyes and wanting to squeeze some more money out of parents pockets, decided to release it on the big screen. Big mistake. This film is easily one of the worst animated movies that's been released under the Disney banner in a long time and that's saying a lot given the good movies they've put out recently.A crop-duster named Dusty (Dane Cook) dreams of being a racer. Having been bored of flying in straight lines over fields constantly, he flies to Lincoln, Nebraska with his friends, a fuel truck named Chug (Brad Garret) and a forklift named Dottie (Teri Hatcher), to enter the Wings Across the Globe race and manages to qualify. Hoping to get some training for the big race, he enlists the help of an old fighter plane named Skipper Riley (Stacy Keach) and manages to get Dusty to improve over time except for achieving a fear of heights he has. Yeah, a plane has a fear of heights and the excuse for why he has it is because he never flew over 1000 feet before. Give me a break. Anyway, will Dusty manage to win the race and conquer his fear of heights? Should this movie have stayed being made for DVD and not have been released in theaters? I think you know the answers to both questions.The story for this movie is so predictable and lazy that it might have been written by a script generator. You've seen the story a million times. The dreamer who is doubted by everyone takes on a challenge and comes out on top. It's nothing new. It goes everywhere you think it goes and hits every single point you think it will hit. There's high points and low points. There's conflicts and dramas. There's attempts at comedy that all fall flat on their face. Yeah, I should talk about that as well. This comedy is dreadful. Not one joke and I mean one joke made me laugh. They mostly consist of unfunny puns and juvenile gags that maybe a five year old will laugh at, but will make everyone else roll their eyes. The animation has some good things in it, but not a lot. For something intending to go direct to DVD, the backgrounds look great. They look very photorealistic, are beautifully rendered and are simply wonderful to look at. Just wish the characters looked as good. They looked amateur at best. Fine for a straight to DVD movie, but pretty lame for a film released in theaters. At least Pixar gave some details and scratches to the characters in the "Cars" films. Here they looked like a toy that came fresh out of the box. There's a reason why movies have keen details. The characters are just the clichéd characters you expect to see in the movie. Dusty is the dreamer with the heart, Skipper is the old mentor with a past, Chug is the silly best friend, and Dottie is the sensible friend. It's just a checklist now that has every single character trait possible. However, there are other things that frustrated about the movie. The cinematography was a joke as it was constant zooms and characters always being mostly centered. The editing was rushed and made the film kind of hard to follow at times. And I really have to ask, why did most of the cast accept this movie? I mean apart from the ones I mentioned, other actors include Cedric the Entertainer, Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Roger Craig Smith, Gabriel Iglesias, John Cleese, and Val Kilmer. Seriously, with a cast like that, I expect a lot better. I'll just say that these aforementioned actors (along with Brad Garret) have been in better animated movies and I suggest watching the other ones they were in than this."Planes" is just a lame movie only made to make money. The story is predictable and lazy, the animation looks amateur at best, and the characters are so generic and have actors that are far better than this movie deserves. There are far better movies out there that have the word "plane" in the title and I suggest you avoid this wrong flight and look at them instead.

ofpsmith I didn't go into the theater expecting a whole lot. It looked to me as if it was jut going to be a Cars spin off. And guess what? I was totally right. All Disney did here was put the face on another machine and make a kids film out of it. Notice I said Disney instead of Pixar. Pixar was not behind this film, it was Disney by themselves. Also keep in mind that I love cars and it's sequel. This was just a knock off of Cars. Well how is the film itself? Not great. It's not really a bad film, but to be fair I can't really call it a good film either. It's just kind of bland. A crop duster named Dusty Crophopper (Dane Cook) is an ordinary Joe Schmoe who dreams of being the best. So he settles on plane racing. Dusty finds a mentor in Skipper Riley (Stacy Keach) an old F4U Corsair to get him ready for the race. And then the big race comes, and it's the underdog story with a greedy co-competitor as our antagonist and all that. That's pretty much the film for you. Overall this was just really bland. The story never really had much interest in it for me and parts of it were just kind of long and drawn out. The most forgettable character was the villain which is that greedy race plane I mentioned earlier. When the villain is the least memorable character, that's a bad sign. I don't know if people like this guy or not, but I don't remember much of anything about him. I don't even remember his name or anything that he did. Keep in mind I haven't seen it in a long time, but still. I should be able to remember at least something about a film's villain, and with this guy I just really don't. I can't really recommend it a whole lot so I'll just end by saying, see Cars instead.

Writer_Commentary I saw this movie on an airplane once since I figured it would be appropriate. I know that it has some connections to Cars, even if it isn't Pixar. While I heard good things about Cars and bad things about Cars 2, I was wondering how a movie like this would fare. Well, I think that the film was good in the end. It may not be entirely realistic, but it's a cartoon so it really isn't supposed to be. I admit that the whole plot of the movie can be a bit obvious and predictable, but that doesn't make it any less enjoyable. Planes was a good use of time on that long flight. The subplots may not be what you expect, but that makes them all the more better. I hope that you enjoyed the film like I did.

Johan Dondokambey The story is quite an average one, especially in animations. It's about one character's struggle and rise from mediocrity to success, from zero to hero. But as it turns out in development and execution, it's nothing new. That may well be understood considering the primary target of animation is to educate little children, in a fun and soft way, on the lessons of life. What makes this quite bad is that despite it puts the big sign "World of Cars" in front of the movie's opening logo, there's nothing else that connects "Planes" to it's parent world. At the least they can do is showing Lightning McQueen passing along on the road or some kind of that, but no, there's nothing connecting them.