Cars 2: An IMAX 3D Experience

This feels like the review in which I’m supposed to report that it has finally happened: Pixar has belched out a disaster and expects us to call it art. That “Cars 2’’ is the animation auteurs running on fumes, that it’s stuck in neutral, that it’s a gas guzzler, that it’s wrapped itself around a tree, albeit a big, astonishingly real-looking, impossibly well-detailed tree. But Pixar already did that. It was called plain old “Cars.’’ “Cars’’ felt very much as if another company had followed a Pixar starter skit. It was what you thought DreamWorks would have done with access to all that rival visual wit but little of the vision. It was far from bad yet too close to ordinary.