Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2: 2 Much Cute!!!

"You know, for a kids movie, that was pretty good."

I always hear people say this when closing out or prefacing a review of a kids movie. By saying "for a kids movie", the reviewer is implying that children's movies should be held in a completely different light when reviewed. That just doesn't make much sense to me. In a sense I do agree with it, but that's mostly because kids movie have a very strong possibility of having the lowest possible standards because their intended audience, children, won't care if a movie is good or not. Therefore, if a movie is good "for a kids movie", then it hasn't achieved any level of greatness; only that it escaped being bad.

The first Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs movie, so I've been told, was a legitimately good movie that was a spoof for disaster movies that went over really well not only with kids, but also with adults, but that may be because of exposure to Mr. T. I say "so I've been told" because I've never seen it. It just never seemed like a movie I had any interest in seeing when I was younger, so word of it being really damned good just never got around to me. And now we have our obligatory sequel because all kids movies need to be a part of a series. Unless you're a movie made by Disney or Pixar, you can't have any movie that ISN'T a part of a franchise, and if you aren't alla The Black Cauldron or Shark Tale, then there's a good reason.

Food, glorious food!

Where we last left off, or so I heard, our heroes destroyed the FLDSMDFR, a machine that turns water into food that was also made by our protagonist, Flint Lockwood, and saved the world..... at least for 5 minutes. Immediately after Flint and his love interest Sam Sparks share a kiss, the president of a Live Corp, a dead ringer for a Stretch Armstrong/Mugatu version of Steve Jobs named Chester V, comes in to help clean up the island by taking all the inhabitants off to the city of San Franjose while his company cleans up the mess made by the FLDSNJUHBYISHVKOLFFR. Naturally, he can't do it, so our heroes go back to the island of Swallow Falls to clean up the mess and permanently destroy the FLDHBKNJLNYHD639F73JT8FO3JHF8EWKTHFIWKRHFU487WEGIOHTO78WEOYHFNEWFIHFHYUGDE49JJDHRO93HF291FR once and for all. The only thing that stands in their way? Foodimals.

Truth be told, I actually really did enjoy this movie. Going into it, I was expecting a barrage of food puns that would have me groaning in my seat, and while I did get that, it was in a tolerable dose. The only puns really came from the names of the foodimals like the mosquitoast, hippotatamus, and watermelephants. Cute puns regardless, and speaking of foodimals, props to the crew that designed them all. All of them look suitable adorable and cool, except for the pickles that just look like bizarre tree people with fishing rods, but the key highlight goes to the marshmallows. For the sake of my sanity, here is a link to what they look like. http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130711035830/cloudywithachanceofmeatballs/images/d/d4/MarshmallowFA.png Brace yourself for adorableness.

As for the rest of the movie, it's all harmless fun. There's an adventure, an obvious villain that says he's a villain in the first five minutes, and great looking visuals that are all bright and vibrant. It's been such a long time since I've seen a kids movie with such color and life to it. You have no idea how refreshing it is to see a movie that has colors from all across the rainbow in it, and embraces that color palette. The world looks so bright and alive and looks I'm so thankful that is does go the more cartoony look for its character designs. Unlike movies like Brave, all of the characters look like cartoons and are meant to look like them instead of just evenly proportioned people, but just CG people.

Do as you are trained.... AND KILL THE MALAYSIAN PRIME MINISTER!

Unfortunately though, the movie doesn't have any substance to it. It's forgettable to a fault, where nothing of value actually sticks to what you see. Even after seeing it a day ago, the movie didn't have nay memorable jokes or characters, just memorable visuals. For a movie, I can see if that was an intended purpose, but there's no meat to this movie. It does look very pretty I will admit, but with virtually no stakes, what's there to gain in this? Other than going back home and trying to stop the foodimals (who aren't all that bad cause evil Steve Jobs is lying and evil), the island is lost and they're living in San Franjose without any charge.

But with such pretty visuals and stellar animation (seriously evil Steve Jobs has some devilishly awesome moves on him), I can safely reccomend this movie to anyone. I don't know if it's better than the original one, but I still think it's worth a watch regardless. I give this movie 3 cute strawberries out of 5.

And now to watch something manly to get over all of this cute. Time for some Buffalo Wings and a Hulk Hogan movie marathon! Santa With Muscles here I come!