What the hell does that have to do with a human audience relating to the characters?

Apparently nothing, as you explained.

Um, any one ever heard of the Lion King?

 

If anything turns off audences it will be the nonhuman faces.

People are animals; people are fine with all-animal movies. Loki makes a very good point with "Cars". I felt the same weirdness about the movie (not to mention a creepy feeling that the world they inhabited was postapocalyptic, but that's another matter). People aren't machines, and ever since the Industrial Revolution there's been a conscious separation between "man" and "machine". Men have life, souls, emotions, etc. -- machines don't. I'm sure I don't need to mention the entire science fiction genre either. A movie with all machine characters would be (as Don Murphy said) DOA at the box office. Nobody cares about robots. They care about people and things they can relate to. They have to be made to care about the Transformers, and even then there still needs to be a human element.

 

Which they had in Beast Wars, by the way -- since they did transform into actual animals. And Beast Machines *defined* the bad guys (the ones you're not supposed to identify with) by how "machine-like" they were, and defined the good guys similarly by how machine-like they *weren't*. There has never been a Transformers series without a "human" tie-in.

I just see no supieriority in animals to a humanoid machine. I just compleatly dissagree. Many people, most even. in my experiance do not feel a profound kinship to the animal kingodom, despite the reality of it. And in allmost any animated movie the animals faces are contorted to convy human expression. The anthrapamorphisation of the characters is up to the filmakers. I have not seen cars but I'd bet that the weirdness you felt was not inherent to the premis but a resutl of a substandard effort of the production. I didn't go see that movie cuz it looked like crap. Besides if I realy need to see that story I can just watch Doc Hollywood.

I don't buy the humans are animals story. I think it is a matter of good writing and characterisation. Not to mention the aplication of human expression to nonhuman faces which works just as well with robots.