Review of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 (2013) by Inspectorj — 01 Mar 2014

The original film was a humorous and original masterpiece. This film on the other hand falls short in that regard.

While there is still an indisputably long list of jokes, the humour for the sequel is more childish and weak, with the exception of some classic puns. However, on a pun note, a large majority of the film’s dialogue is solely puns, with some even being repeated, not allowing any powerful story-line or morals to develop, resulting in this – a predictable (and frankly, dry) plotline from which you can know the outcome of the film within the first 20 minutes, such as with blatant foreshadowing and the villain; as soon as you see this certain character, you know he will be the villain without a doubt of hesitation, making the character very bland and uninteresting. Additionally, the story is very confusing at times, as quite often the scenes are very fast-paced with events happening too quickly for the audience to understand. It almost seemed the creators were really trying to squeeze as much in as they could, but quality is always better than quantity.

On positive notes, the animation was certainly fluid – with one character’s animation being truly original with quirky elements that were very humorous and imaginative. The creativity of some ‘foodimals’ was remarkable, and the world itself was truly colourful. Seeing some of the returning characters was also very joyful, but I will note that some obvious cameos seemed very forced.

In terms of the original, this film also seemed to disregard its own lore created in the original, going against a lot of the reasoning to the first film’s story and creating an entirely new reasoning, such as: why Flint wanted to become an inventor.

Concluding, it is an enjoyable film targeted for kids, but if you were hoping for the same originality as the first film, you might want to stick with the first meal and not go back for seconds.