by Bruce E. Parry
This one I saw in a theater with my son, Savaun. He liked it. I did not. I was really absorbed by Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs(2009) #1. I found it humorous and charming. It was aimed at both adults and children with a subtlety that made it worth seeing. I was hoping for more of the same from #2. I didn’t find it.
Savaun liked it because the film is populated with food that is alive and their names are particularly clever. If you go to the website, they run down all the foodimals. They include, but are not limited to, the Tacodile Supreme, the Apple Pie-thon, the Bananostich, the Cantelope (a given), the Double Bacon Cheespider and the Hippotatomus. There are a bunch of others, but you get the idea.
While these names are cute and the characters funny, they are one-liners running throughout the movie. Also, the jokes are clearer on the website than in the movie itself for many of the less important foodimals.
The movie begins with a review of the first movie and what happened, leaving us with protagonist/hero Flint Lockwood trying to impress his childhood hero Chester V, who it turns out, is a villain! (Have you seen Upwhere the same plot devise is used to better effect?) The rest of the film is the conflict between his loyalty to Chester V or his responsiveness to his fiancé, his father and his other friends and comrades from the first movie.
Maybe the charm of the first film just overwhelmed me, but I did not even care the for the animation in this film. I assume the animation teams and style wee about the same and by the same people. The foodimals looked forced to me, not the kind of anthropomorphic (giving human form to the non-human) characterization I would expect. In short, they looked cobbled together, not integral.
I also guess that the character development was supposed to carry over from the first film. You know that Sam is strong and moral. That Flint is a dweeb. That his father, Tim, is hard-nosed, etc. The only character in this film I found interesting was Tim, who actually develops rather nicely during the film and is transformed by the experience. The other characters don’t seem to be.
Overall, the film was a disappointment and not really worth seeing. Sorry, Cloudy, but this sequel was about the money it could make and not about the film.
Copyright Bruce E. Parry
This one I saw in a theater with my son, Savaun. He liked it. I did not. I was really absorbed by Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs(2009) #1. I found it humorous and charming. It was aimed at both adults and children with a subtlety that made it worth seeing. I was hoping for more of the same from #2. I didn’t find it.
Savaun liked it because the film is populated with food that is alive and their names are particularly clever. If you go to the website, they run down all the foodimals. They include, but are not limited to, the Tacodile Supreme, the Apple Pie-thon, the Bananostich, the Cantelope (a given), the Double Bacon Cheespider and the Hippotatomus. There are a bunch of others, but you get the idea.
While these names are cute and the characters funny, they are one-liners running throughout the movie. Also, the jokes are clearer on the website than in the movie itself for many of the less important foodimals.
The movie begins with a review of the first movie and what happened, leaving us with protagonist/hero Flint Lockwood trying to impress his childhood hero Chester V, who it turns out, is a villain! (Have you seen Upwhere the same plot devise is used to better effect?) The rest of the film is the conflict between his loyalty to Chester V or his responsiveness to his fiancé, his father and his other friends and comrades from the first movie.
Maybe the charm of the first film just overwhelmed me, but I did not even care the for the animation in this film. I assume the animation teams and style wee about the same and by the same people. The foodimals looked forced to me, not the kind of anthropomorphic (giving human form to the non-human) characterization I would expect. In short, they looked cobbled together, not integral.
I also guess that the character development was supposed to carry over from the first film. You know that Sam is strong and moral. That Flint is a dweeb. That his father, Tim, is hard-nosed, etc. The only character in this film I found interesting was Tim, who actually develops rather nicely during the film and is transformed by the experience. The other characters don’t seem to be.
Overall, the film was a disappointment and not really worth seeing. Sorry, Cloudy, but this sequel was about the money it could make and not about the film.
Copyright Bruce E. Parry
RSS Feed