Trailer
Plot summary
Lightning McQueen wins his fourth Piston Cup and returns to Radiator Springs, where the Italian formula racer Francesco Bernoulli challenges him to the World Grand Prix. Sir Miles Axlerod, a former oil tycoon, has created the three-race event to promote Allinol, his new alternative fuel. McQueen travels to Tokyo for the first race with Mater and their friends Luigi, Guido, Fillmore, and Sarge. Mater eats wasabi at a promotional event and makes a scene, embarrassing McQueen. Looking for a restroom, he blunders into a struggle involving Rod "Torque" Redline and two lemon cars, Grem and Acer, and Redline attaches a device to him. The British agents Finn McMissile and Holley Shiftwell then take Mater for the contact they were waiting to meet.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Cars 2 (2011)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For international releases, the minor character Jeff Gorvette was voiced by real racing drivers familiar to each market, including Fernando Alonso in Spain, Vitaly Petrov in Russia and Sebastian Vettel, renamed 'Sebastian Schnell,' in Germany.
SPOILER
Paul Newman, who voiced Doc Hudson, died of cancer in September 2008; John Lasseter said they would "see how the story goes with Doc Hudson", and the character was eventually dropped, implied to have died a few years before the events of Cars 2.- Lasseter's partner Steve Jobs and the release of the iPad solved one crunch: supervising technical director Apurva Shah wrote a review app that let Lasseter complete reviews by recorded voice memo for lighting, animation, effects, set design and layout while commuting.
- Cars 2 was the first Pixar film to be shut out of the Oscars entirely, and the first not nominated for Best Animated Feature since that category was created in 2001.
- Voice actor Joe Ranft, who played Red in the first Cars film, died in an automobile accident in 2005, so the character has no vocal role at all in Cars 2.
- George Carlin, the original voice of Fillmore, died of heart failure in June 2008, and the character was recast with Lloyd Sherr for this sequel.
- In March 2011 U.K. screenwriter Jake Mandeville-Anthony sued Disney and Pixar for copyright infringement, alleging that Cars and Cars 2 were based in part on work he had submitted in the early 1990s, and sought an injunction to stop the release of Cars 2.
- Cars 2 was made for an estimated budget of $200 million, which makes it one of the most expensive films ever made.
