Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs

I feel like everybody already talked about this, so I'll jump on the bandwagon as well.

I was never really attracted to Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs when it first came out. I thought it was silly and perhaps very childish. When I finally decided to watch it (after watching the trailer for the sequel and laughing hysterically at all the puns), I put it on the TV while my father and sister in law were present as well, she was excited since she hear lots of good reactions from it, my dad (even though he always enjoyed animation films) was a bit skeptical like me. In the end I really enjoyed the film, the concept turned out to be really cute, the designs were very funny, the animation was pretty amazing but overall the puns and funny inside jokes and sort of "blissful ignorance" was hysterical.

And I'm a sucker for puns.

The designs of the characters are based of simplified proportions of the human body. Seeing the sketches they've made, they remind me of illustrations of you would see in books for children (while the story is based off, in fact, a book, the illustrations are totally different than the outcome of the movie). The style of sketches resemble those flatpanel kind of illustrations without lines on the edges, but because of the flat use of colours and little dimension added to them, they're still more 2D illustrations than 3D. I think this was a right choice to make the designs in such a way, since it translates really well to 3D character models.

Because of the style being so derived from the original anatomy, a lof of movements are possible that would've been unthinkable in a more realistic approach of animation, which really adds to the movie. The animation is perfectly aligned with the designs, being quirky, funny and very exaggerated. For example: instead of "neatly" trying to animate the hands typing on a keyboard, the arms just flail around. This gives the impression of typing on the keyboard, but adds a whole lot of humour to the scene.

As said before, I love puns, and the producers really hit the nail on the head with the designs of the foodimals (food-animals). They're fusions of animals and food which share similarities in either shape, name or both. The shrimpanzees for example is based off the likeliness in the name: chimp/shrimp, while the hippotatomus have a common sound, but also look and form. While watching the film and every time a new foodimal was introduced, they had me laughing like crazy because of its cleverness and funny designs. 

The designs of the foodimals are simplified, but still very recognisable as animals, which is cleverly done by the designers. All the foodimals are all really kind-natured and look like stuffed plushies to me, so I find it hilarious that they think at first that they're evil, while they're all just another species trying to survive.