John Lasseter deserves a lot of credit – not only did he write and direct the Toy Story films, which put Pixar on the map and set them up for a series of mostly excellent and incredibly popular movies, but he had a big hand in introducing master animator Hayao (Spirited Away) Miyazaki to the west, and arranging perhaps the best dubs in anime history. It’s arguable, in fact, that no western director has had as big an impact on the animation scene of the last two decades as Lasseter.

So how he’s managed to make a film as truly awful as Cars is pretty bewildering.

I have to admit a certain amount of partiality here – I just could not get my head around the basic concept of talking cars. Anthropomorphised toys? No problem. Bugs, fish, monsters, all okay. But a parallel dimension where cars live in houses and hang around race tracks and watch TV just addled my brain like no other movie this year has managed to do. They have no hands – they couldn’t build anything. The more the film drags on, (and it drags on a lot), the more I tried to rationalise its baffling premise, until eventually I just had to give in and admit that it’s very, very stupid. It should never have got off the drawing board, and you have to wonder if Lasseter has gained such god-like status at Pixar that no-one dared to stop and say, “John, talking cars is a really dumb idea.”

The plot, for what it’s worth – well, the plot is the plot of Doc Hollywood, with a dash of Days of Thunder thrown in to give the Pixar guys something interesting to animate for at least a small portion of the running time. Owen Wilson voices Lighting McQueen, who gets sidetracked from his racing career when he winds up stuck in Radiator Springs, a hick town that has dropped off the map since it got bypassed by a motorway. There he learns that there’s more to life that fame, fortune, adoring fans and huge sponsorship deals involving private helicopters.

Only, he learns it very slowly, and in ways so predictable and heavy handed that the Pixar guys might as well have just flashed gigantic messages on the screen and saved us all a lot of time and money. Progress is BAD. Motorways are BAD. Small middle-of-nowhere redneck towns full of cringe-worthy stereotypes are, on the other hand, GOOD, and we should all go and live in them, (at which point they’d presumably become BAD and we’d all have to move on again.)

The reason that it takes so long for all these trite homilies to sink in is that McQueen is an idiot. But then, even after learning two hours of painful life lessons, finding love and discovering that having friends is better than not having friends, he’s still an idiot. In a cast of bland, irritating and horribly clichéd characters, Wilson’s tedious, self-obsessed hero stands out as the one you’d most like to drive off a cliff.

It’s only partly his fault – the script is, for the most part, disastrously unfunny. It, too, is stuck on its premise, so that it can’t offer much beyond bad car puns and surreal car-related takes on our own world – the only faintly amusing one being the idea of ‘tractor tipping’, but even that scene drags on way too long. In fact, tellingly, the only real laugh is on the closing credits, and involves Pixar rifling through their own back catalogue.

Since I’m a little exhausted from ranting I’ll admit that the animation at least is fantastic, and the use of light particularly is a giant leap from what anyone has done before – though, even then, the weird and slightly creepy character design undermines the animators’ hard work. And I’ll leave you with this thought: if there really was a world inhabited by talking cars, isn’t it more likely that they would be nomadic? I mean, we’re talking about objects fundamentally defined by their mobility rather than they’re old fashioned, stay-at-home values.

So … a remake of The Cave of the Yellow Dog with cars, anyone?