Sunday 20 September 2009

Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs



'Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs' is awesome!

CG animated films are a dime a dozen these days, and aside from the Pixar films, I rarely bother to even catch them on DVD. But the trailer for this movie got a chuckle out of me, and today my friends and I decided to check it out. What I saw was one of the funniest things I've ever seen in a cinema.

The fact that the film has a monkey, evil gummi bears, and a character voiced by Mr T, all contribute to this, but there's something else: this actually feels like a cartoon.

This film isn't afraid to be very silly indeed - in fact it revels in it, and dares to do things that you can't do in live-action. For me this is the whole darn point of the medium, yet for some reason no-one does it anymore.

Heck, there were even a few moments were the animation ITSELF made me laugh - I can't remember the last time that happened at the movies. Does this mean that one day cartoons can be fun again?

Of course it's still got nothing on the Looney Tunes, but I'm excited to have seen a movie that even reminds me of them, when every other film these days is a 'Shrek' sequel.

I'll be seeing this one again... in 3D!

4 comments:

Stodoe said...

It was one of the first movies I've worked on that the directors gave us so much free range to just "MAKE IT FUNNIER"
Phil and Chris would make comments like "That's just dumb" and the animators would get a little down. But they would come right back and say "NO that's a good thing. Dumb means it's made us laugh."
It was such a treat to work on something like this for the exact reason that you said. It's a cartoon. We enjoyed every moment of it because we knew that we were working on something special and that chances are we won't be able to work on again. I'm so glad people are liking this movie.

John Atkinson said...

Wow, you worked on the movie? Cool!

My friends and I have been acting like monkeys since we left the cinema, and there will be a dozen of us next time - soon we'll be an army of Steves!

Thank you guys, for making this film so much fun.

Anonymous said...

I'm with Stodoe on this. It was so much fun to make this movie and it shows when you watch it. John, I'm glad you and your friends enjoyed it and all of us animators are so excited that everyone is liking it so much. Keep an eye on our blog:
http://room1403.wordpress.com/
Over the next few weeks we'll be posting Cloudy clips and talking about how we approached the animation.
Swallow Falls FOREVER!

John Atkinson said...

Hey David, I'll keep an eye on Room 1403 for sure - the animation in this movie felt very different to what I've seen in CG, and I'd like to know how the heck you guys did it!