Hacker Cinema
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
2009 · Film · 90 min
Directed by Phil Lord, Christopher Miller
Inventor Flint Lockwood creates a machine that makes clouds rain food, enabling the down-and-out citizens of Chewandswallow to feed themselves. But when the falling food reaches gargantuan proportions, Flint must scramble to avert disaster. Can he regain control of the machine and put an end to the wild weather before the town is destroyed?
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10 comments on Hacker News
I'm not sure I still buy that. Super Mario was great. I think the Troll movies are very well done and entertaining. Despicable Me, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Rio, Klaus, Iron Giant, and Studio Ghibli films are pretty good and competitive to the low-mid tier Pixar.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudy_with_a_Chance_of_Meatballs
Definitely the movie name too, and assuredly not the book which came out 30 years before. (Which the movie is based on)
Headline based on movie name
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudy_with_a_Chance_of_Meatballs_(film)
Are you simply talking about the shading style? Because otherwise there's nothing similar in style between Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and any Pixar film of that generation.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs was very much pushing animation style dramatically at the time and brought a lot of Fleischer, UPA and Looney Tunes animation into 3D for the first time.
Regarding your point of Marvel agreeing to it: Sony still owns the rights to Spider-Man for a lot of domains. That was purely a Sony film with little to no Marvel input. Source: I worked on it.
> Just go watch Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
It's the same plasticky "Pixar style" as any other computer animated movie in the past 30 years. And I'm saying that as someone who enjoys the movie immensely.
> There's also tons of animation variety from outside America.
This is true, and it's my mistake not to mention this.
> So there's not a great risk to reward ratio.
Indeed. And that's why it's surprising to see experimentation to come from these two sources (Sony Animation may have made it, but it was Marvel who agreed to it: they guard their properties like hawks)
This is a terribly ill informed take.
Sony Animation ( who you misattributed to marvel) were already pushing animation style heavily. Just go watch Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
There's also tons of animation variety from outside America. The issue is that in America, a lot of the style was defined by Pixar. Which was probably the biggest experiment of them all.
But even among the major studios, there's a lot of variety in style. Trolls is incredibly stylized and DreamWorks really pushed style far in Kung Fu Panda 2.
Even Pixar are now experimenting more with style with Luca and Turning Red.
This is also only considering feature film work. If you pay attention to shorts, there's a huge variety.
It comes down to Art Direction. Arcane and Spiderverse are expensive and require an insane amount of per shot bespoke work. A lot of people also tend to find hyper stylized content not as compelling. So there's not a great risk to reward ratio.
When I saw that The LEGO Movie had not even been nominated for the Academy Award for best animated picture, I immediately stopped the recording of the awards show, and deleted it from my DVR.
The decision to buy the DVD was absolutely effortless.
With respect to the team behind the Angry Birds movie, they're using Sony Pictures. On the one hand, they have a couple Aardman releases and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. But on the other, they have The Smurfs.
Reminds me of "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" [1]
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0844471/
I've greatly enjoyed some 3-D movies. My impression is that the current systems do better when the dynamic range in value isn't very strong. "Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs" tried to do all sorts of transmitted light effects that are tempting but don't quite work. Other films, like Avatar, Tangled, Tron, and the 3-d conversions of Toy Story 1+2 and work a lot better.
Last weekend I was playing with some 3-D glasses, black paper and colored pencils, trying to draw stereoscopic images by hand. The first thing I realized is that you've really got to get conventional perspective right... It has to tell a consistent story or your brain is going to really rebel.
"Soon, you won't want to buy a TV without a browser." Hello, WebTV of 1995…
Love the browser demo; you can’t read a single word shown on-screen. Massive UI fail in trusting normal websites to be TV-friendly! This is why AppleTV has had its own YouTube browser for years now. Heck, the Google TV demonstrator has to manually start fullscreen mode on YouTube. She mentions LeanBack as an alternative UI, and describes it as "intuitive." Have you tried it? I have. I couldn’t figure it out. It is exactly the opposite of intuitive.
Edit: Irrelevant comment: The demo starts with Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, a terrible movie based off a great book? Interesting Google chose an antithesis of (Jobs-founded) Pixar for their demo.