Look ma, no hands!

HOW DO YOU BUILD a world without opposable thumbs? This is the question I kept pondering as I watched “Cars” last weekend. The Disney/Pixar movie posits a universe populated entirely by automobiles; even the insects look like Volkswagen Bugs. And yet, from the very first scene, it’s also a universe where racetracks, freeways and buildings rise up in a facsimile of our all-too-human world. “Who did all the construction?” I mumbled to my wife as we sat in the theater. “How could any of this exist when the cars, literally, cannot handle tools?”

“Why don’t you just enjoy the movie,” she replied, but I couldn’t let it go. Finally, with a sigh of mild exasperation, she turned to me and whispered, “It’s a movie about talking cars. How could it possibly matter if they have thumbs?”

On the one hand, my wife is absolutely right, of course; when it comes to a film about talking cars, complaining about thumbs is quibbling at best. At the same time, even the most fantastic world requires authenticity. I am a logic stickler; I want the loose ends of my fictions tied up.

I love “The Terminator” because, of all the time-travel stories I’ve encountered, this one alone makes sense on its own intrinsic terms. The same is true of Philip K. Dick’s novel, “The Man in the High Castle,” with its vision of an alternative reality in which Germany and Japan won World War II. Batman has always been my favorite superhero -- not just for his noirish sensibility, his interior darkness, but because he’s human, he has no superpowers, which makes him credible in a way Superman can’t touch. My point is that suspension of disbelief is the stuff of a delicate balance. I’m willing to go quite a distance with you -- as long as your unconventional reality plays by some conventional rules.

This is what makes Pixar’s other movies so remarkable. They take place in a logical universe, albeit one where the logic has been subtly tweaked. In “Toy Story,” the toys are only animate when there are no humans around; otherwise, they are still and silent, just like ... real toys. “The Incredibles” operates from a stunning premise: What if superheroes were sued by those whose lives they had disrupted (which is exactly what would happen in the world we live in) and were forced into a witness protection program, where they had to pretend to have no powers at all? Even “Finding Nemo” passes the suspension-of-disbelief requirement. Except for the fact that the fish talk and behave like people, it all makes sense. And once Nemo is plucked from the deep by human hands, the logic of the cartoon landscape blends seamlessly with that of the actual world.

At the heart of all these films’ appeal resides a lingering suspicion: that there is more going on around us than we can ever know. Every kid understands what it is to imagine the secret life of toys or pets or the guy next door: He’s gone a lot, so he just might be a superhero or a spy. That’s the essence of fantasy, that notion of possibility, and in order to work, it has to grow, no matter how tenuously, out of the quotidian aspects of daily life. Yet in “Cars,” mundane realities are taken for granted, or more accurately, not taken into account at all.

During my senior year of high school, I had a creative writing teacher who assigned us to write a nonsense poem, in the style of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear. I set down whatever images I could come up with -- only to be admonished, when I got my poem back, that nonsense was altogether different from not making sense at all. What my teacher meant to introduce us to was a fundamental truth of the imagination: There are boundaries, borders, rules of engagement, and even an illogical universe must have an inherent logic if it is to resonate.

“Cars” has its moments; it is bright and flashy and unexpectedly cogent on how the interstates ruined Route 66. Yet here too the movie contradicts its own internal ethos, arguing for a human-scale perspective while remaining utterly devoid of human beings. It’s another question left unanswered, another flaw in the fantasy. And in the end, it’s one more reminder that you can’t build a world without opposable thumbs.

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DAVID L. ULIN is book editor of The Times.