Jordan says, “Yum!
“Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2” has stunning visual effects of food that has become alive as animals.
It is funny, it has a great cast and amazing animation. It is a great film for viewers of all ages.
If you haven’t seen the first movie, the beginning of the film gives you a quick rundown of what happened.
In the first film, Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader) is a young inventor who eventually creates the “Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator” or “FLDSMSFR,” which is a device that turns water into food.
The machine starts creating food that is problematically humongous, so Lockwood ends up having to try to destroy his greatest creation.
The second film begins only minutes after the first one ends. Lockwood is contacted by big-name scientist Chester V. (voiced by Will Forte), who requests him to come to San Fran Jose to work for him.
Lockwood accepts the job opportunity and is soon sent on a mission to stop the “FLDSMSFR,” which the viewer finds out isn’t destroyed. Lockwood goes with the same crew of misfits who helped him destroy the machine the first time.
The animation of the film is incredible because of the way the producers created animals made out of food. There are elephants made out of watermelons, chimpanzees made out of shrimp, and a spider made from a cheeseburger and fries. The movements of the characters had life-like fluidity.
The way the producers made the animals out of food, or “foodimals,” was awe-inspiring. The names of the “foodimals” were hilarious and fit perfectly with the real names of the food, like”shrimpanzees” and “watermelephants.”
The voices fit perfectly for each of the actor’s respective characters. In most films, I’m not the biggest fan of the way Anna Faris acts, but her quirky voice was perfect for the film.
Hader is hilarious in all of his movies. He even has me laughing in his T-Mobile commercials. Andy Samberg voiced Brent McHale, and he is one of my favorite comedy actors. The guy’s voice alone can make me laugh.
Overall, I liked this movie virtually from start to finish. The cast is awesome, the storyline is wonderful, and the animation is amazing. The only thing I thought could improve the film was the jokes. Some of them made me laugh out loud, but others were just too similar to each other.
I am giving this movie an A-. With better jokes, it would have easily been an A, if not an A+.
Matthew is on the fence
“Cloudy 2” is a lot like some of the girls I meet in St. George. It’s really pretty, and it’s fun for a few minutes, but there’s not a whole lot of substance.
Sony Pictures breaks what I consider to be the cardinal rule of animation (and Dreamworks is guilty of this, too): An animated character should be voiced by a person with an animated voice.
When you’ve got characters like Bill Hader’s Flint Lockwood who sounds like Bill Hader and Anna Faris’ Sam Sparks who sounds like Anna Faris, then you’ve got dull characters. Neither Faris nor Hader use any sort of real cartoonish inflections in their voice overs, and that really bugs me because I know both of them are capable of doing cartoonish voices.
However, Kristen Schaal’s voice is a different story, and you can’t go wrong with Will Forte’s, either. Barb and Chester V. were both fun to listen to. I only wish they got more air time.
I can appreciate the word mashups. It takes a smart cookie to come up with a term like “tacodile” or “shrimpanzee.”
But the wonderful wordplay and beautiful imagery doesn’t make up for the sheer ridiculousness of the story.
With all the chaos and color, I can see why this killed at the box office over the weekend. It’s the perfect place to take a screaming child. The story is so scattered that it doesn’t matter if the theater is full of whining brats. Any plot points you miss won’t matter because the film doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to begin with.
But hey, this movie’s target audience isn’t adults. So I can’t fault it for being batcrap insane.
In the end, I’d give “Cloudy” a B-. It’s visually stunning, and I might bump that grade up if I could watch it with the sound turned down and Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” playing instead.
