Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2: Review
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 is the latest animated comedy to come out of Sony Animation Pictures and the sequel to a film that I am still recommending a few years on. The original film was loaded with humour, heart and hilarity; all balanced out nicely throughout the film. The animation was innovative and exciting, which made the movie a very welcome presence in a period where a glut of CG comedy films were flooding the marketplace.
So Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 had very big shoes to fill if it were to avoid the trap so many animated comedies fall into when they rely on sidekicks, fart gags or tiresome puns to lure audiences to their ultimate disappointment. A look at the trailer gives any potential audience member, wary of such ploys, an uneasy feeling: there are puns galore; a cutesy strawberry sidekick, fart and poop gags throughout and a worryingly generic look and feel … it didn’t bode particularly well. It looked unfortunately, like it was heading the way of the lazier, cash-in sequels, made in the expectation that Mum and Dad will fork out their hard earned money to keep the kids entertained for a little under two hours. However we all know trailers can be deceptive, and just as you never judge a book by its cover you should never judge a film by its trailer!
Cloudy 2 starts immediately where the first film left off, and when I say immediately I mean about 10 seconds after. In a fit of his trademark manic exuberance brought on by destroying the FLDSMDFR, our hero Flint Lockwood decides to form a team with his island friends and create a laboratory called “Sparkswood” with Sam Sparks, his weathergirl-friend; Brent, the chicken suited former bully; Manny the enigmatic cameraman; Earl the cop and Steve the monkey.We are also introduced to Chester V; an eccentric genius and head of Live Corp, and a man who Flint admires completely.
Chester V is where the film starts to get special. The expressive animation alone is enough to captivate; it’s funny, it’s smart and it shows a character reminiscent of Steve Jobs (I think it’s fair to say the filmmakers were not shy in hiding this). The CG rig of Chester V looks like a light bulb glued to a stickman, but seeing him move was mesmerizing: animation fans will laugh, animators will want the rig. The film hasn’t even started and it has already outclassed its predecessor with its technical innovation with a single character.
Chester V invites Flint to abandon his dream of “Sparkswood” and join his team of scientists at Live Corp, whilst his team clears the island of the destruction caused by Flint’s invention. The Islanders are rehoused and given new jobs on the mainland in San Franjose, but find themselves in a tiresome rut. Once a big fish in small pond, Flint’s creative scientific mind is now just one of hundreds that populate the skyline-dominating Live Corp bulb. As Chester V’s broken promises seem to mount up, he convinces Flint to go to Swallow Falls and recover the FLDSMDFR alone, but the Sparkswood team reunite and take a sardine fishing boat to the destroyed town.
Since our heroes left, thee entire island has become a jungle teeming with “Foodimals.” This is the part of the film where the creativity and the humour we loved from the first film returns in full force. It hadn’t exactly been lacking up until this point, but here you had the feeling you were at the core of the film, as the Sparkswood team voyage through a pun-laden jungle; past Shrimpanzees, Bananostriches, Meatballruses, Watermelephants and a whole host of other cleverly constructed foodimals.
As the film progresses, Chester V shows a meaner and meaner side to his personality, and becomes more distant to his faithful Human-brained-Orangutan sidekick Barb in his efforts to split Flint up from his rag tag team. This dynamic to the character is hardly a plot twist; more a slow evolution from glittering savior to menacing megalomaniac.
Chester’s real purpose within the film is to create tension and new dynamics within the main cast. He pits Flint against the rest of the team, and in some cases, this provides the lesser characters their only involvement in the story and saves them from total redundancy. Although the movie does not suffer from the inclusion of Brent and Earl, it can’t really be said to have gained anything either. The same could also be said for Flint’s relationship with his father, which goes through a fairly predictable arc, but at least builds to an exciting resolution in the finale.
The friction between the characters over the course of the film reveals the characters to be deeper and more emotional than can normally be expected from a comedy, but the film does a good job of juggling this sentimentality with a full on wacky comedy with jokes peppered throughout even the most heartfelt parts. One scene in a maple syrup bog perfectly balances the drama of Flint’s tenuous relationships with his team and the comedic centre this film has.
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 is an excellent example of what animated comedy sequels should aspire to be. The animation is spectacular, the creativity on all levels of production is plentiful and (aside from the food animal puns) the humour is crafted around the world it inhabits, as opposed to the world being crafted around the cheapest gags the scriptwriters could muster. Whilst its status as a sequel means it could never hold as many surprises as the first film, it is still surprisingly good, and I recommend it to both fans of the original and newcomers alike.