RingSide Report

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By Radical Rhymes

I’ll admit it once again – I am a geek, a nerd, a dweeb. Whatever the current terminology is. I am a hopeless lover of Star Wars and Star trek and most things science and fantasy fiction. I also love cartoons and animated films/movies.

Do you love them too? Toy Story. Ice Age. Monsters Inc? I love them all.

Sometimes they really surprise you. Wall e was one such surprise. It started slowly and I wasn’t invested at all. Then the character and the setting grabbed me. The wreckage of the Earth. The endearing nature of the robot and his pet cockroach. Magical.

Then when he was taken to the spaceship, I realized that this was a dramatization of E.M Forster’s short story ‘The Machine’ and I absolutely adored it. How magical! It captures something important, as all stories do.

That is why I think we should encourage children to read. Anything. Everything. Because in stories lie the struggles, the philosophical questions that we all wrestle with. Courage. Hope. Fear. Love. Death. Meaning. Even the comic books that some adults dismiss carry these themes.

For instance, one of my favorite movies in the animated genre is Cars. It’s a Disney Pixar effort that effortlessly takes us into a universe where vehicles are people. It didn’t take long at all for me to buy into the premise. Cars as people. Of course!

It is also one of the most challenging films for me, largely because of how it ends.

WARNING. Before continuing, if you haven’t seen it but you want to, stop reading now. If you have already seen it, or never will, then please carry on!

Lightning McQueen is the main character. A racing car with zero friends, huge ambition and a similarly gargantuan ego. At the start he is all about the winning. He wants to win the Piston Cup and become the first rookie to do so.

His ego prevents him from winning the final race because he dismisses the advice of his pit crew and refuses to have replacement tyres. As a result, he draws with The King – a dominant racer at the end of his career – and the long-standing runner up Chick Hicks. The King is a Chick is a selfish, spiteful character willing to do whatever it takes to win.

To cut a long story short, Lightning finds himself marooned in a small town being slowly killed by a bypass taking cars and custom away from it. While there, he makes friends and learns what’s important in life.

Ultimately, in the final race arranged to decide the winner of the Piston Cup, Chick wrecks The King and Lightning is just about to cross the line. But he doesn’t. He stops, turns around and goes back to shunt the King over the line. Chick wins!

And here is the crunch. I hate the ending. Not really, but it causes me grief. Should Lightning have gone back, or should he have denied Chick the win THEN gone back to help the grand old racer? I get that the film needed to show how much he’d learned, I get that chick’s victory was hollow and no-one cared about it.

But still…

On balance I get that this was the best ending really, but I still struggle with it. Stories and their messages, their struggles, their dilemmas! And in the end, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have won first then helped The King…

Oh well!

Radical Rhymes is a professional artist working with a range of media – predominantly animal/human portraits and landscapes – including, most recently, hand painted furniture. You can see his work on Instagram Radicalrhymes1969 or on Twitter @RhymesRadical.

For commissions, please contact him on Twitter via Direct Message or by email at: radicalrhymes@outlook.com His work is also available to buy on Etsy