Disney Pixar CARS 2 Movie Review

Disney Pixar CARS 2 Movie review – includes spoilers and the full plot but continue reading if you want to know if the CARS 2 is suitable for young kids.

Disney Pixar’s CARS 2 movie red carpet premier is today. I didn’t travel to Hollywood, but I was able to see the CARS 2 with my kids today, and CARS 2 is a must see family movie for 2011.

CARS 2 is James Bond meets car racing meets adventure around the world meets a story about friendship and (surprisingly) about corruption in the global oil business with a (mixed) message of importance of finding a solution for renewable energy. Yes, it is one jam packed action movie, a smörgåsbord of everything that makes up a box office topping movie in 3D and it will be in movie theaters on June 24th.

CARS 2: Story of Friendship

The movie continues the story we all loved in the Disney Pixar movie CARS in 2006; the story of car racing king Lighting McQueen and his success and his friendship to a tow truck Tow Mater. Forward a few years and the cars are still friends, and this time they are facing an adventure of a lifetime when Lighting McQueen is invited to attend a car racing World Grand Prix that takes car racing from Tokyo to Porto Corsa to London organized by a rich former oil mogul turned into a philanthropist Miles Axlerod. Miles Axlerod had devoted his life to finding renewable, clean-burning energy source and the World Grand Prix is a big celebration of different types of car racing cars all jointly racing using Axlerod’s new fuel, Allinoil.

Lightning McQueen takes Tow Mater with him for the World Grand Prix tour, and the car duo’s friendship is put to a test because Tow Mater quite doesn’t have the worldly manners and the Tokyo racing scene ain’t Radiator Springs. Tow Mater embarrasses Lightning McQueen and his actions contribute him losing the first race. As the movie continues, they both realize that nothing is as important as friendship, and friendship is worth fighting for. When I asked my children (aged 8, 9 and 11) what they thought was the main lesson of CARS 2, they all said it was learning about friendship and being less selfish and caring about your friends. It also taught a great lesson that you shouldn’t listen what other people say about your friends, you should always be on your friend’s side.

CARS 2: A Story of International Espionage

The World Grand Prix has something to do with international espionage involving a large oil company; the British Intelligence and it’s agents Finn McMissile and Holley Swiftwell are on it to solve the mystery. The movie starts with scenes that could be from any high impact action movie like Mission Impossible or James Bond, but this time animated for the entire family to watch. As a mom I would have a problem with “cars dying” in explosions and being crushed and showing it to under school aged children, and it did bother a little even my kids. The first 10 minutes of the movie are probably the most violent, so even if you do want to see CARS 2 with younger kids, don’t judge the entire movie by its first 10 minutes.

Finn McMissile mistakes Mater as an American intelligence agent, and Tow Mater is towed into an adventure around Europe involving spy gadgets that would make even James Bond green of envy. The adventure teaches Mater about being a spy but more importantly he learns more about himself and comes to a conclusion that he is special as he is, even when lacking the high world class. And speaking of world – the movie takes you around the world and you will visit the animated versions of some of the favorite cities of the world, and our entire family loved the travel aspect of the movie.

CARS 2: Story of Bullying and Bad Guys

Ends up that the “lemons” of the world have united and are cooking up a revenge for all of those cars who make fun of their poor qualities and for those car manufacturers who have stopped manufacturing parts for the cars needing them. This sad group of cars want to humiliate the best of the cars and makes the race cars crash one by one in the World Grand Prix. On the end the head of this corrupted group is revealed and it is Miles Axlerod, who had only disguised himself to care about environment; even the Allinoil new fuel was all fake.

In a way I thought it was odd how the movie made the bullied cars turn into the bad guys, without really learning a lesson in the end that you should not answer to bad actions with bad actions. But as you have already now read, the movie was very multi leveled with different aspects for the viewers to think about and my kids did come to a conclusion that “even if other people are bad you shouldn’t be bad”. Also, the fact that the car who was first seen as the ultimate “good guy” turned out being the “bad guy” is a good lesson for kids to learn; you can not always trust people, however good they may seem first. I want my children to learn the lesson, and think what better way to learn it than from a Disney movie.

CARS 2: Story About Global Oil Business and Need for Renewable Energy Source

Global oil crisis most certainly is a topic that interests in today’s society. Finding renewable energy source should be even more important. In the movie CARS 2 new oil sources are found in the world, and the Allinoil turned out being fake and not a real solution. Did someone high up complain how Disney Pixar’s WALL-E was too harsh of a picture of how we are destroying the earth by polluting it, and now Disney had to take it back by providing hopes of finding new oil and keeping the status quo? I guess as an environmentalist and a hopeless optimist I would have loved to have seen how a new fuel had been invented solving the global energy crisis, but when it comes to reality, I guess it was good to show our kids that there is still a lot to do to find the solution. I just wish that we wouldn’t have given a false hope of new oil resources found.

CARS 2 Continues the Disney Pixar Success Story

CARS 2 continues the Disney Pixar movie successes in my opinion, and I predict it will be the hit family movie of the summer 2011. It did have almost a little too many different aspects and it might be a little difficult for some of the younger viewers to follow. But that’s what makes a Disney classic – you can watch it again and again and learn something new each time.

CARS was the first movie that really hit home for my son, now 8 years old, and I still remember too well how Life is a Highway, I wanna Ride it, All Night Long became an unofficial theme song for our family. Fittingly this was around the time we moved from Tennessee to Colorado and drove by the historic Route 66. Now CARS 2 movie is almost here, and Lightning McQueen will take it around the world this time, and I can’t wait to see it and inspire our family to travel around the world soon too. At least we will get to take the world tour with the movie!

Watch the film clip with Disney Pixar director John Lasseter above and how he already thought during the promotion of CARS how cool it would be to do another movie where the characters of the movie would travel around the world. In CARS 2 race car Lightning McQueen (voice of Owen Wilson) is back with his buddy tow truck Mater (voice of Larry the Cable Guy) and the rest of the gang from Radiator Springs. This time, they’re heading overseas for the first-ever World Grand Prix, where Mater gets caught up in an intriguing adventure of his own: international espionage. The movie introduces hilarious new characters and red-hot racing around the world.

CARS 2 will premiere on June 24th, 2011.

CARS 2 in LEGO

With the movie comes of course the gear; the CARS 2 merchandise. While there will be many many products sold under the CARS 2 license, I think one story here is above others; the story from the LEGO brick master who created the CARS 2 LEGO products. Take a behind-the-scenes look at a day in the life of a LEGO master builder Erik Varszegi and hear how he created the Lightning McQueen model made entirely out of LEGO bricks. Measuring 12 feet long and over 6 feet at its widest point this smiling character is made up of almost 250,000 tiny bricks.

And here are some of the LEGO products already now available for purchase. You can see more at The Official LEGO Shop.

Video and pictures courtesy of Disney Pixar, Disney and Disney Living.

If you get one movie for the Holidays, let it be UP.

Even if your kids are too young or too old for Disney movies, get UP.

If you don’t have kids, at least rent UP.

UP is my favorite Disney Pixar movie, and you know the good company it is in, coming from the Pixar family. UP makes you cry, UP makes you laugh and you will sit on the side of your seat just waiting what will happen next in this amazing story of what happens when you get old to realize that your life has been full of then-when’s (you know – then we’ll travel when kids are older), and you have once last chance to make it right.

I saw Up with my family a few months ago, but I can’t wait to get the DVD and watch again with my kids. Such a touching story, and something for everyone in the family to think about regardless of age.

AN INTERVIEW WITH PETE DOCTER: DIRECTOR OF DISNEY/PIXAR’S UP

How did you come up with the movie’s storyline?

Pete Docter: A number of years ago, I was sat in a room, throwing around ideas with co-director Bob Peterson and a lot of the themes we came up with were about ‘escape’ and ‘getting away’. We kept coming back to the idea of this floating house that felt cool and poetic – and the idea of ‘getting away from the world’ seemed to strike a chord with us.

What made you choose a 78-year-old man as the protagonist in Up?

Pete Docter: Well, we had always wanted to do something with an old man – specifically, someone with a lot of attitude. We had fun playing around with the idea of this grouchy guy who would slam the door in people’s faces. It was something we hadn’t really seen before in animation.

You’ve created a story about a 70-year-old man in a society that’s obsessed with youth… Carl doesn’t have hairs on his ears or too many liver spots. Are you trying to keep an ideal vision of growing old?

Pete Docter: It’s definitely idealized and caricatured, but I look at the veins in my own hand and I think, ‘Well, you wouldn’t want to see that on a cartoon character.’ Everything is simplified to be more appealing – and we certainly did that with Carl’s wrinkles and the pockmarks on his nose. He’s definitely a senior citizen with his hearing aid and walking stick, but he also has a fun look to him.

In the movie Carl travels to South America, why did you pick South America?

Pete Docter: Early on, the story was set on a tropical island because I’m a big fan of tropical islands. I thought to myself, ‘Well, if we have to do research on a tropical island, that won’t be so bad.’ But there have been so many movies where a character gets stuck on a tropical island and we wanted something different, so we had to think up something new. We needed a location where Carl could get stuck with this kid. It couldn’t be somewhere where he could just turn to the police and say, “Here, take care of this youngster.” We wouldn’t have a movie if that was the case.

So you decided on the tabletop mountains of Venezuela?

Pete Docter: Exactly. One of the guys at Pixar had a video of these mountains in South America called the tapuis – and they were perfect. Why? Well, one of the major themes of the movie is adventure. If you think about adventure, South America is one of the few places in the world where new things are being discovered all of the time. Even to this day, you hear stories of a new species of monkey being discovered that nobody has heard about until now. That’s amazing. This place is so full of secrets, darkness and mystery. That seemed like a good setting.

Where did you get the idea of the talking dogs?

Pete Docter: The dogs came from an idea that Bob Peterson and I developed early on. We tried to make the dogs think about subjects that real dogs think about, like food and squirrels. We had one idea where Dug was a failed science experiment from a Russian satellite that crashed in the mountains, but ultimately we came up with the idea of Charles Muntz – the main villain in the movie.

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Pixar is famous for incorporating sneaky hidden references throughout their movies… What hidden gems can fans find in Up?

Pete Docter: There are loads of hidden references, but I’m not giving everything away here. At the end of Monsters, Inc. Boo holds some toys and one of them is a fish, which is Nemo from Finding Nemo – but the audience didn’t know that at the time. Finding Nemo hadn’t been released at that point, so he was a secret character put in there. There’s a character from Toy Story 3 that you don’t know about yet that turns up in Up. Good luck finding it…

INTERVIEW WITH JORDAN NAGAI – THE VOICE TALENT IN UP

Jordan Nagai provides the voice of a wilderness explorer Russell in Up. Like Pete Docter, the director explains in the video clip above – Jordan was pretty new to acting before being a voice talent in Up.

Tell us about your new movie, Up

Jordan Nagai: Up is about a young wilderness explorer called Russell. Russell needs his last wilderness explorer badge – the Assisting The Elderly Badge – so he goes to his elderly neighbor, Mr. Fredricksen, to see if he can get it.

What happens when Russell meets Mr. Fredricksen?

Jordan Nagai: Mr. Fredricksen has just lost his wife and he is about to lose his house, so he decides to go on an adventure by attaching balloons to his home. He sails into the sky, but Russell accidentally goes along for the ride.

What is Russell like?

Jordan Nagai: Russell is an active, enthusiastic and determined 8-year-old boy. He loves animals and he loves the wilderness, so he has a great time exploring when they land near Paradise Falls. Russell is a funny, helpful and smart boy – and he wants to get this last badge to please his father. I like the way that he’s funny. He makes a lot of jokes – and he sometimes shows off what he knows from his wilderness explorer camp. He shows Carl – Mr. Fredricksen – different knots and the different calls of animals.

How did you get the part of Russell?

Jordan Nagai: The principal at my school sent out an email to all students saying there was a audition for 9 and 10 year old boys. My brother was 9 years old at the time and he went to the audition, so I went along with him. Even though I was only 7 years old, I was allowed to do the audition too. I did several auditions after that – and finally, I got the part!

How difficult was it to record your voice in the sound booth?

Jordan Nagai: It wasn’t very difficult, but I had to repeat the same lines over and over again. I also had to stand for a long time, so it was a little tiring. The director – Pete Docter – tried to make it easier for me, so I took a lot of breaks. I had a lot of fun recording the voice!

What do your friends think of your new fame?

Jordan Nagai: They are all very excited for me. We went to see the movie together on opening day. They like the movie a lot and they think that I’m very lucky.

Get the Disney/Pixar UP on DVD on November 10th.