Herbie and her out D.E.B.S. director Angela Robinson careens into the big time at the helm of Disney's beloved car in Herbie: Fully Loaded.

Never underestimate the power of girls in little plaid skirts. While Angela Robinson's D.E.B.S.--the title of both her acclaimed short and her boisterously fun feature film--unapologetically featured a lesbian romance at its center, the films showed Robinson's pop sensibility and her ease with both rousing action sequences and tart comic dialogue.

So even if mainstream America isn't necessarily ready for girl-on-girl romance, the folks at Disney saw in Robinson the perfect person to revive the studio's "Herbie the Love Bug" franchise, about a humanlike 1963 Volkswagen Beetle that climbs walls, wins races, and helps out "his" human pals.

Opening June 24, Herbie: Fully Loaded stars Lindsay Lohan as a young girl who, after rescuing Herbie from the scrap heap, fulfills her dreams of becoming a racer. (Lohan, for all her tabloid travails, has a gift for Disney scraps, having resuscitated The Parent Trap and Freaky Friday in well-received remakes.)

Robinson, who says she's in her early 30s and in a relationship, has already gotten one rave--hanging on the wall of her office at Disney is a test-screen form from a 10-year-old girl who calls Herbie "the best movie in all history."

Did you grow up watching the original Herbie films?

I loved the movies when I was a kid. [For this movie] I was most attracted to the idea that it was a girl who wanted to be a race-car driver. And then I thought "Herbie goes to NASCAR" was hysterical. But I really tied it into the story--Lindsey Lohan plays a girl who really wants to be a NASCAR driver, and her dad has quashed that dream. Then she meets Herbie and secretly starts racing--Herbie also has a dream of being a race car again, and we find them chasing their dream together.

I'd heard that you insisted that it be the original car and not be a new Beetle.

They were always going to do the original Bug, but I didn't want it to be a [computer-graphics-animated] car, like [the film incarnations of] Garfield or Scooby-Doo. There's a movement to have kids movie protagonists be entirely CG. I was really arguing for the character and style of the original Herbie, using the '63 Bug and analog effects instead of digital. But his love interest is a new Beetle [laughs].

I'm all for the return of analog. Because if you can do anything, then it's not interesting anymore.

Exactly. I felt the same way. Even in my short I did a lot of green screen [for superimposition]. I'm very in to the new wave of cinema, but you still have to keep the heart. And I feel like I tune out too when it's digital--I prefer a guy in a fur suit, like Chewbacca, going [roars] to an army of clone robots or something. And so we used 37 Herbies, but we built four robots--animatronics, basically. It's old-school, [Muppets creator Jim] Henson-like, where there are four guys with controls making Herbie go up and down.

Going from indie film to suddenly working on a cherished Disney character--was it a strange transition?

You know, they're super cool. I wasn't out to be like, "I'm going to reinvent Herbie!" My whole pitch was how I thought you could combine the old with the new in a fresh way to create a story with a lot of heart that was fun. But they were remarkably, I think, farsighted in that they were able to see something like D.E.B.S. and then figure out that that would be a great way to approach Herbie. One of the questions for me was: Will kids still respond to Herbie? But they get it immediately. There's something about the Volkswagen that they just get.

Tell me about working with Lindsay.

She's amazing. I'm excited because I feel like we've barely begun to see what she's capable of doing as an actor. As a director you're always looking for who can pull off what you want to do, and she is so effortless. Other actors obsess about what they're doing, and she just is. Working with her was a total pleasure. And then there was this crazy kind of celebrity whirlwind circling the production. Occasionally you'd have to run from the paparazzi--

Did you have photographers pretending to be PAs sneaking onto the set?

Yeah! A lot of the PAs were just people whose sole job it was to block the paparazzi's shots. They weren't allowed to touch the paparazzi, but they'd be chasing them down; Lindsay's bodyguards were chasing them down. It's crazy--she's got an eye for them too. She's like, "Who's that guy?" And I'm just directing the movie, I'm not paying attention, and I look over and I'm like, "Who is that guy?" And all of a sudden, everybody would be like--[jumps].

You are a director who's black, female, and lesbian on top of that in a field where there aren't a lot of any of those things. [Robinson laughs] Do you see the industry becoming blind to that stuff?

I have no idea if my being hired represents any sort of change. When I'm approaching a movie, it never occurs to me that somebody won't give me a job because I'm a girl. I'm kind of happily clueless [laughs]. I'll walk into the studio and they always send me to the messenger entrance [laughs]. But a lot of women have helped me and been incredibly supportive in my career. The whole reason I was able to do something was this organization, POWER UP, that gave me money when I did the short. The gays and women have really looked out for me--I worked on L Word with Ilene Chaiken, and then [lesbian Disney studio chief] Nina Jacobson hired me. I feel like women especially have helped me get a leg up. I think what I help them with is that I really want to compete with the big boys.

You called Herbie a coming-out story in The New York Times.

And I meant that. But in the broadest way, about a kid trying to communicate to a parent who they really want to be. And in this case it's a race-car driver. In our discussions of how to frame the story, we called it Herbie the Communication Bug instead of Herbie the Love Bug. He's forcing them to communicate and stop having these walls within the family--which is all out of love. It's a very light but I think very soulful story about these characters who don't want to disappoint their father, who's alone because their mom died--of course, because it's a Disney movie and the mom's always got to die! [Laughs]