Review: 'Cars 3' steers a welcome if imperfect gender shift

Brains and a heart or plush leather seating and cup holders?

While the cycle of life and death is movingly detailed in most every Pixar movie, particularly in the "Toy Story" series, the aluminum-thin world of "Cars" has always been the exception.

Yet kids — boys especially — love them, and so Pixar keeps making them, even while reproduction, itself, remains a foggy issue in "Cars"-land.

Lacking the magic of Pixar's more tender touchstones, "Cars 3" mostly makes you pine for the halcyon summers of "Ratatouille" or "WALL-E," an era that unfortunately continues to recede in the rearview.

Previous "Cars" director and Pixar chief John Lasseter cedes the directing to veteran Pixar storyboard artist Brian Fee for "Cars 3," which finds an aging Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) getting outraced by a new pack of metrics-optimized young racers like the arrogant Jackson Storm (Armie Hammer).

The movie is almost as loud as a NASCAR race; Wilson's McQueen — a confident winner, not a humble underdog — remains the most uninteresting of Pixar protagonists; and the whole thing, like previous installments, is nauseatingly male, without a female racecar in sight.

Pixar, a high-tech digital animator predicated on old-school storytelling, has long made calibrating progress with tradition its grand mission.