Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Cloudy

Last week we saw CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS in 3-D!! After those ugly early screenshots & near ZERO publicity my expectations of this picture were pretty low. But it's got a lot going for it. The design is pretty eccentric for mainstream Hollywood animation but refreshingly different. In 3-D the characters have an appealing, vinyl-toy aesthetic, especially the policeman (hilariously voiced by Mr T.)

There's a lot of fine animation too-particularly memorable is the posing & facial expressions on the greedy Mayor (a perfectly cast Bruce Campbell) and the nimble little moves of the monkey.

In general it seems a lot of artistic decisions that may have been watered down at other studios survived the process. There are story points towards the end that are just plain surreal but funny as hell. Congrats to my Aardman colleague Kris Pearn who was head of story on the movie. Check out some of his boards over on his blog.

3 comments:

max said...

I saw it two weeks ago, as you I also went in with low expectations, I mostly went to bring my daughter, but man I enjoyed it, really lots of fun.
Agree on what you say, plus I'd also say that they did a great job on the colour palette. Very bold throughout yet tasteful.

Matt Jones said...

MAx-did your daughter enjoy it? I felt a lot of the humour would fly above the heads of younger kids. Some it is almost subversive-it does stick it to US consumer/fast food culture. Did the 'poultry scene' freak her out?!

max said...

She enjoyed it a lot, of course she didn't understand anything of what was going on but that doesn't matter.
She loved the chicken fight scene (phenomenal idea) most of all, she's now constantly pretending that she's fighting against chickens.