All of Your Deep, Existential Cars 2 Questions Finally Answered By Pixar Chief

Did you spend long nights tossing and turning in bed after seeing Pixar's 2006 animated feature film Cars -- asking yourself answer-less questions like, "Why are there sidewalks in a film world where humans don't exist?" Or, "Where do baby cars come from?" Was your mind blown when you heard that this weekend's Cars 2 introduces dinosaurs into its 21st century carscape? If so, you are not alone. Box Office Magazine was also troubled by these existential Cars queries and sat down with Pixar head John Lasseter to get some answers.

Be warned though, Lasseter goes to some ambiguous extremes to make sense out of his vehicular universe.

On whether the dinosaurs mentioned in Cars 2 are also automobiles:

I mean, in the mythology of the Cars world, the living creatures are vehicles of some kind, and so it's like with dinosaurs. I always imagined it would be some kind of dinosaur-like car or vehicle, something like that. It would actually be an animal.

On whether dump trucks are the "bovine class of the Cars universe:"

Yeah, I was driving across Nevada at one point and I was driving by myself. [...] And I looked across at this dump truck and thought to myself, "That's a long way away!" And I realized, "Oh, that's one of those huge guys!" It was at some mine or something, and I realized how gigantic this thing was, and it was like, "That's kind of fun."

On why there are not really animals in the Cars world:

We don't really have animals within this world. I like the idea that there are some--in the same way that we have intelligent beings and then animals that have brains and stuff but they're still animals.

Uh, OK. And regarding which kind of vehicles are most like animals...

And I sort of think with the tractors, we established that there are certain types of vehicles that are just more like animals and stuff.

On why most of the car characters are orphans:

I originally had the idea that there's no parents and kids because cars are manufactured--there's no having babies in this world. But we did tap into that because I wanted to show Francesco Bernoulli's mother as an old Formula-1 car. I don't know--maybe he's adopted.

So, yeah. If you were confused about the Cars world before, you're probably even more confused after hearing Lasseter try to explain this Pixar world. Maybe it's just best to sit back and enjoy this weekend's sequel without asking existential questions?

· Exclusive: We ask Pixar's John Lasseter, "Is 'Cars' in a parallel world or post-apocalyptic? [Box Office Magazine]