Genre Analysis

 Genre Anlysis

Cars

The opening scene for Cars has many conventions to show the audience its an Motor sport action adventure film. It does this through the narrative, iconography (props, costumes etc), characters (star system), and the locations.  

Narrative 

The opening scene starts with a voice-over and mini clips with different parts of a car put in them. The audience are then shown a dark screen but with little light and glimpses of a car. All the way through the first 30 seconds of the opening scene the audiences are shown little peaks of a car, which is telling us that this film could have something to do with action adventure and cars. The car then starts to move and roll into a shot of bright light. This is when the audiences finds out this is a car adventure film, as we end up in an f1 like face track. This is when the audiences is introduced to protagonist as well as the main character. After this the race starts and we continue to watch the race all the way through the opening scene, but there are also titles being shown to us as well. 

Iconography - props 

In this opening scene we are not shown any types of weapons being used, but we never know if there is any in the rest of the film. Similar to Need For Speed, we could say that the cars themselves are the weapons when racing as they are competing against each other to win the race.

Iconography - costumes  

In typical motor sport action adventure films there are people wearing either race gear or casual clothing. But this film is very different. This is because the cars are the characters in this film so they will have to clothing. But you could say that the cars are the costumes and that we know its a car film from the cars anyway. 

Characters 

In the opening scene the audience are already introduced to who we thing is the main character of the film as well as him being a protagonist. We are then introduced the a few of the stock characters, this is shown in close ups of a few cars going round a track, so we intestinal think these character must be quite important. The audience are not introduced to any antagonist during the first scene of the film, but we still know there could be one. This is because we have audience pleasure where we watch the genre of film we like because we can sort of predict what is going to happen. The audience are also already getting to know the story line, so if the film is about races then there will be some rilvary between the characters so that they can win the race. 

Locations

In typical car action adventure films, the locations are either a race track, or somewhere with clue its going to be a car film for example a garage. This film is very good at its location, as the opening scene is shot on a F1 like race track which would intentionally make the audience think the film is going to be about cars and racing.