by Laura Falin posted in Life

I have a soft spot for the Cars franchise.
I think it's because the first movie came out when my oldest was 4 -- the prime age, I think, for kids to fall in love with Lightning McQueen. It was one of those rare movies that the kids liked, had nothing questionable or too scary, and that I thought was clever and funny. It led to a Cars obsession in our house for a good long time (it also led to an unfortunate incident when I was potty-training my daughter where I googled "cars," "girls," and "underwear" in a desperate attempt to find her some little girl underpants with her favorite characters. But that's a whole other post.)
We weren't as crazy about Cars 2 (and neither were a lot of people). It was confusing. It had disturbing scenes where a car gets beat up by baddies in the bathroom and is eventually murdered. There was espionage and something about fossil fuels and lots of chasing and explosions. I thought it was too much for my littles. Thankfully, with Cars 3, we're back to the fun of the first movie.

This time, we find Lightning McQueen at the top of his game -- racing his buddies, having a good time, and losing and winning graciously. And then a new generation of cars hits the field. They're built better. They win races with technology and number-crunching. And Lightning is left in the dust. In other words, he's getting old.

After a disastrous crash, Lightning sets out to recover physically and emotionall...