MEET THE FOODIMALS IN “CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS 2”
Columbia Pictures Online Release
In
Sony Pictures Animation’s new, 3D animated comedy “Cloudy with a Chance of
Meatballs 2,” young inventor Flint Lockwood and his pals discover that the food
machine is still active and is now churning out food-animal hybrids… foodimals!
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| Photo courtesy of Columbia Pictures |
“If
you can find a good mix of an animal and a food that not only gives you a great
design but also a cringe-worthy pun, that’s what we wanted,” says co-director
Cody Cameron.
“One
of the first missions we gave to Craig Kellman, our lead character designer,
was go forth with those directives and show us what you got – in a weekend, he
came up with a library of ridiculousness, a lot of which is still in the film:
a taco plus a crocodile equals a tacodile, a watermelon plus an elephant is a
watermelophant. We had to make sure we covered all of the food groups – the
fruits, the vegetables, the meats – and we had certain action pieces in the
film… the tacodile is one of the larger threats in the movie, and the
cheespider – half cheeseburger, half spider – became the main large threat of
the island, the one where you realize that something is wrong on the island. As
the story developed, we came up with more and more. They’re going down the
river, we found river creatures like the hippotatomus and the flamangos and the
lemmins and the wild scallions.”
Cameron says, “The development of sentient food started
with a conversation that [co-director] Kris Pearn and I had about what type of
food we wanted in the film. After talking about pickles and strawberries, I
spent a Sunday
sculpting some produce and posing them in scenes in my back yard. I wanted to
show what real fruits and vegetables would look like photographed in a natural
environment, under sunlight,” he says. “We used that as part of our pitch.”
But that was just the beginning. “Kris and Cody came to
me with the idea of the food puns – inspired by Lewis Carroll’s
bread-and-butterflies – and they wanted me to see if I could come up with a
bunch of those,” says Kellman. “I don’t know how many they were expecting, but
in that first weekend I came up with a list of over 100 of them – and the guys
laughed a lot. Some of the foodimals were created by other artists – Cody
invented the watermelophants and the bananostriches, and our head of story,
Brandon Jeffords, came up with the shrimpanzees. I did a lot of the really
punny ones – the fruit cockatiels, the flamangoes, the susheep, the kiwi birds,
the tacodile. There was no pun too stupid for me.”
“As
much as they could, Cody and Craig kept the original identity of the food
intact as much as possible,” says the film’s production designer, Justin K.
Thompson. “We didn’t want to lose the texture and the detail that real food has
– the watermelophant has the texture of a watermelon and the cantalope has the
texture of a cantaloupe. As obvious as the puns are, that’s the fun – kids can
recognize their favorite foods in the foodimals and be able to name them.”
“That
comes from a mandate set in the first movie,” says Kellman. “Real world food
can look unappealing sometimes, but all of the food in the world of “Cloudy”
was idealized, like you see in commercials. So even though my original designs
were kind of simplistic, children’s book renderings of the foodimals, we knew
that in the end, the animators would bring them through that filter and come
out more realistic – tasty and appealing, but with legs and arms and mouths and
eyes.”
Since then, the foodimals have taken on a life of their
own. “It’s been fun watching the animators get a hold of the foodimals,”
Cameron continues. “Like the bananas – do they slip a lot? The pickles – they
don’t have legs, they have little tassels that come out of the bottom, like
walking on two mops. When the hippotatomus opens its mouth, steam comes out,
like a baked potato. Every character, we try to find a different way to
locomote – lots of variety in motion.”
“The
foodimals are my favorite part of the movie,” says voice actor Faris. “The
cheespiders, the hippotatomuses, the cantalopes. It’s really inventive and fun,
how they gave these food creatures personalities.”
“I
think Barry is the funniest character in the movie,” says actor Bill Hader.
“There’s a scene in which Flint is trying to rally the troops, and Barry is
behind Flint, translating what Flint’s saying, and it’s really, really funny.”
Opening
across the Philippines in Oct.
9, 2013, “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2” is distributed by
Columbia Pictures, local office of Sony Pictures Releasing International. Visit
http://www.columbiapictures.
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