Cloudy with a chance of explosion

Sony Pictures Animation and IMAX Corporation  today announced that Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, an adaptation of the bestselling children’s book written by Judi Barrett and illustrated by Ron Barrett, written for the screen and directed by Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, will be released to IMAX(R) theatres simultaneously with the film’s wide release on September 18, 2009. The special IMAX(R) 3D release will be digitally re-mastered from Sony Pictures Animation’s Stereoscopic 3-D master into the state-of-the-art image and sound quality of The IMAX Experience(R) with IMAX DMR(R) (Digital Re-Mastering) technology. The film is produced by Pam Marsden.

“Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs is a fantastic animated motion picture that will play extraordinarily well in 2-D, but in IMAX 3D, audiences will practically be able to feel the food landing in their laps,” said Rory Bruer, president of worldwide theatrical distribution for Sony Pictures Entertainment.

“Sony’s new title is a great family story, and we believe the 3D storytelling will resonate with IMAX audiences worldwide,” said IMAX CEO Richard L. Gelfond. “Our growing commercial theatre network will enable us to share this special title with more audiences worldwide, and we’re pleased to partner with Sony to deliver a brilliant film in IMAX 3D.”

“Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs is a great addition to our Fall 2009 film slate,” added Greg Foster, Chairman and President of IMAX Filmed Entertainment. “This all-star cast of talent and animation artists combined with a wonderful story will transport moviegoers from their seats right into the fantasy world that is Swallow Falls.”

In 2009, Columbia Pictures’ and Sony Pictures Animation’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs will be the most delicious event since macaroni met cheese. Inspired by the beloved children’s book, the film focuses on a town where food falls from the sky like rain.

Bill Hader, star of “Saturday Night Live” and Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, will voice Flint Lockwood, a young inventor who dreams of creating something that will improve everyone’s life. Anna Faris, who recently turned heads as the star of the comedy hit The House Bunny, takes on the role of Sam Sparks, a weathergirl covering the phenomenon who hides her intelligence behind a perky exterior. James Caan plays Tim Lockwood, Flint’s technophobic father. Andy Samberg plays Brent, the town bully who has plagued Flint since childhood. Bruce Campbell plays Mayor Shelbourne, who figures out that Flint’s invention can put the town, and more importantly himself, on the map and Mr. T plays the by-the-rules town cop Earl Devereaux. The film also features the vocal talent of Neil Patrick Harris.

About IMAX Corporation

IMAX Corporation is one of the world’s leading entertainment technology companies, specializing in immersive motion picture technologies. The worldwide IMAX network is among the most important and successful theatrical distribution platforms for major event Hollywood films around the globe, with IMAX theatres delivering the world’s best movie presentations using proprietary IMAX, IMAX 3D, and IMAX DMR technology. IMAX DMR is the Company’s groundbreaking digital re-mastering technology that allows it to digitally transform virtually any conventional motion picture into the unparalleled image and sound quality of The IMAX Experience. The IMAX brand is recognized throughout the world for extraordinary and immersive entertainment experiences for consumers. As of March 31, 2009, there were 371 IMAX theatres (250 commercial, 121 institutional) operating in 43 countries.

IMAX(R) IMAX(R)3D, IMAX(R) DMR, The IMAX 3D Experience(R) and The IMAX Experience(R) are trademarks of IMAX Corporation. More information about the Company can be found at www.imax.com. You may also connect with IMAX on Facebook , Twitter and YouTube.

About Sony Pictures Entertainment

Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) is a subsidiary of Sony Corporation of America (SCA), a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Corporation. SPE’s global operations encompass motion picture production and distribution; television production and distribution; digital content creation and distribution; worldwide channel investments; home entertainment acquisition and distribution; operation of studio facilities; development of new entertainment products, services and technologies; and distribution of filmed entertainment in more than 100 countries. Sony Pictures Entertainment can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.sonypictures.com.

About Sony Pictures Animation

Sony Pictures Animation exemplifies the next generation of CGI storytelling to produce a variety of animated entertainment for audiences around the world. Sony Pictures Animation is developing a full slate of films including the mouth-watering 3D comedy Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs now in production for a September 2009 release, in pre-production on Hotel Transylvania and in pre-production in association with Columbia Pictures on The Smurfs Movie. In 2007, Surf’s Up, was nominated for an Academy Award(R) for Best Animated Feature and won two Annie Awards. The company’s first film, Open Season, was a box office success and the # 2 DVD title of the year for Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. Its sequel, Open Season 2, released in 2009, was an international family hit. Sony Pictures Animation is an operating unit of Sony Pictures Digital Productions.

(SOURCE :Prnewswire)

Cinematical got a sneak peek at several of the scenes from Sony’s upcoming CGI film Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs recently, and about the worst thing we can say about it is that it’s Pixar … ish. Which is a bit like saying, “Gee, your watch sure looks like a Rolex.” Not entirely insulting. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, and Cloudy looks extremely sharp, the jokes are funny, and it made me very hungry. Plus it has a great voice cast featuring Bill Hader, Anna Faris, Bruce Campbell, Neal Patrick Harris, Andy Samberg, Tracy Morgan, James Caan, Bobb’e J. Thompson, Will Forte and Mr. T (!). So who’s complaining?

Writer/directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord, creators of the gone-before-its-time Clone High (which I can’t praise enough — unfortunately it’s only available via bootleg, or in Canada), took us through the story behind the children’s book turned into only the third CGI big-screen extravaganza from Sony Pictures Animation (who also doled out Open Season and Surf’s Up). They also showed off some of the completed scenes in 3D, and you can read all about it and check out some new images behind the jump. This wasn’t very high on my radar this year, but now that I’ve had a taste, we’re ready for a full serving.

For those of you not in the know, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs was an illustrated children’s book by Ron and Judi Barrett that first appeared in 1978. It’s since become a wacky and beloved family classic, and is very light on story, and heavy on illustrations. The plot is fairly basic: residents of a town called Chewandswallow experience precipitation in the form of food three times a day, and they set sail on boats made out of bread for more normal shores.

Like The Iron Giant, Shrek, and The Polar Express that came before it, Cloudy was significantly expanded beyond the covers of the book to make it a cinematic experience. If you’ve ever seen the books those movies are based on, you know how slim they are. As a result, filmmakers ended up using the stories as a rough framework, while devising completely new plots for the films, and Lord & Miller came up with their own unique take on the material.

In the film version, scientist Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader) has had a long string of failed experiments, including a bizarre combination of rats and birds — a ratbird that plagued the town of Swallow Falls. It’s a dull and dreary place built entirely around sardine canning, and that’s all they have to eat. Flint tries to build a machine that will synthesize any food out of water, but that too goes awry and sails into the clouds above the city like a rocket from the Apollo era.

However, shortly afterward, cheeseburgers begin plummeting from the heavens. It worked! Of course, since this is a movie, something goes dreadfully wrong. At first the citizens are in food utopia where anything they can imagine rains down: ice cream, steaks, you name it. But Flint’s machine begins growing in size, and so does the food. They close the school when it gets flattened like a pancake by … a giant pancake, and so on. Flint, aided by weather reporter Sam Sparks (Anna Faris), then has to try to save the town.

Phil Lord pointed out, “The book is really very short. It doesn’t have a whole lot of characters. It’s a very simple plot and it luckily works well as a movie structure, sort of like the Jurassic Park plot, which was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat if there were dinosaurs? Yeah, wow, that’d be really neat. Oh wait that would be really bad and horrible and dangerous. Let’s get out of here.’ That’s basically the plot of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, but with food instead of dinosaurs.”

Christopher Miller agreed, and said they were both surprised when Sony approached them to direct it. They’d worked on the story and script for a year and a half, but had moved on to writing duties on How I Met Your Mother when they got a call asking if they’d be interested in directing it. He points to their experience on Clone High as invaluable background to jump into a feature, “A lot of the same things apply. There’s still timing and comedy and storytelling and they’re all basically the same, but you just have an incredible amount of resources and you’re working with so many other great artists.”

So what does it look like? If you could imagine Pixar humans with about 15% of the Muppets thrown into their DNA, you’d have something resembling the cast of Cloudy. Lord & Miller both acknowledged that the Muppets were an influence, and worked closely with the animators in creating unique looks for each of the characters. Flint’s father Tim (James Caan) has a unibrow that recalls Sam the Eagle, Flint himself has Zoot’s nose, and Sam looks slightly like Janice would if she’d ever opened her eyes.

That’s not to say every character looks like a Muppet. Mr. T looks like a highly stylized vinyl figure of himself, sans mohawk and multiple gold chains, and his son played by Bobb’e J. Thompson looks like an adorable little Little Rascal come to (virtual CGI) life. The town itself also looks very realistic, and I thought many of the photos on one wall in their storyboard area were reference shots from a real town. They weren’t. They were CGI renders of the town they’d created for the movie, which is the largest virtual town ever created for an animated film.

There’s a large palette of different sources on the screen: Flint’s laboratory is very Tron influenced, the town itself is gray and dreary before the food starts falling, at which point it turns bright and cheerful. Speaking of the food, it all looks mouth-wateringly good. Seriously. The plummeting burgers look amazing when they pop open and spill out lettuce, pickles and tomatoes. The 3D was a nice touch, and not the gimmicky “OH MY GOD!” factor, and Miller & Lord had just found out shortly before my visit that the movie will be appearing in IMAX theaters in 3D as well. I’m sure it’ll look just dandy in 2D, too, if that’s what you’re into.

Besdies Hader and Faris as the leads, the cast rounds out as follows:

• James Caan plays Tim, Flint’s father. He looks like a gruff bear of a man, and makes a living as a mechanic. He’s extremely confused and frustrated by his wannabe inventor of a son.
• Andy Samberg plays Baby Brent, a former child star who appeared in a sardine ad (think the little Coppertone girl) who now lives off residuals and is a general jackass. Lord calls him, “The most appalling character in the entire world.”
• Neil Patrick Harris plays Steve, Flint’s monkey who has been hardwired with a speech device. However, he usually only runs around saying his own name.
• Mr. T plays Earl, the valiant policeman in town. He doesn’t look particularly T-ish, although there’s an homage to T late in the movie as he crashes through an enormous nacho chip.
• Bobb’e J. Thompson stows his famously foul mouth for this movie. “He’s actually a very professional, very nice kid,” said Miller. He plays Cal, Earl’s adorable son, and they have a very tight father/son relationship. One that Flint wishes he had with his own dad.
• Bruce Campbell plays the town mayor, who is heavily modeled after Mayor Vaughn from Jaws. He doesn’t want the food phenomenon to end, because it will kill the tourism dollars (sound familiar?). He also embraces the food wholeheartedly, and becomes enormously fat throughout the film.
• Will Forte plays the voice of “Everyman” in the movie. According to Lord, “We initially were going to cast lots of normal voices as the townspeople, and we thought ‘Hey, what if they all have the same voice?’ So Will Forte became that voice.”

One nifty touch: Phil Lord asked Ron Barnett about an image from the book of a little kid wearing a Groucho Marx glasses and mustache disguise drawn back in the corner of the Roofless Restaurant. Barnett told him, “Oh, that’s just a little inside joke to myself, because the food falls ‘From de skies.’” De skies … disguise. Holy bad puns, Batman! So, Lord & Miller made sure to include that same little kid in the movie.

I was barely aware of this film before, and I left very excited about it. And not just because of the Clone High connection. There’s a lot of funny stuff in this film, both for children and adults, including one prominent monkey poop joke that both audiences will appreciate. Cloudy comes out on September 18th, which just seems too far away. We’ll be bringing you more about this movie until then, so stay tuned.

Official Cloudy with a chance of meatballs website

(Source: Cinematical )

read more about the post on the Vancouver Film School Blog here

9 epic adventurre fantasy

Tim Burton’s done comic book heroes, big budget futuristic adventures and sci-fi alien invasion stories, yet the director has never introduced one of his films into the hallowed halls of the geek-tastic carnival that bows down in worship to all those genres: Comic-Con. 2009, though, is going to be Burton’s year.

On Friday, July 24, Burton will pull on his producer’s cap and bring his post-apocalyptic animated escapade “9” to San Diego. And when he does, he’s hoping to get over a traumatic experience he had at the convention in the late ‘70s.

“I went when I was a student at CalArts,” he told MTV News. “I’ll never forget this, and it’s probably why I haven’t been back since, because it was so terrifying. They had a slideshow for the original ‘Superman,’ and in the middle of it some fan gets up and just very angrily goes, ‘Superman would not change into his costume on the ledge of a building! You are destroying the mythology of Superman!’ And he got up and walked out, followed by other people. That scared the s–t out of me! So I haven’t been back since then.”

Tim Burton

In this respect — and luckily for Burton — “9,” unlike the Man of Steel, doesn’t have a diehard following stretching back to the 1930s. What “9” does have is serious pedigree: the short film on which it is based was nominated for a 2005 Academy Award.

Contemporary movie buffs count the film as one of the most anticipated of the Con. Joining Burton at the Friday panel will be stars Elijah Wood and Jennifer Connelly, director Shane Acker and producer Timur Bekmambetov (“Wanted”).

The movie tells the story of a group of small, Frankenstein-esque clockwork creations as they battle an army of machines that has destroyed the world. “I just love the texture and stop-motion feel to it,” said Burton, who connected with Acker after watching the short. “I know animation is broadening its horizons but this just felt different… I liked the world that [Acker] created and the texture. It felt like a different type of animated film. The visuals were helping to create the story. I just felt very in tune with the look and feel of it.”

“Our goal as producers—if you see someone you like, you don’t want to suppress them—the goal was to create an environment where he can do his thing,” Burton continued. “My attitude is always to give suggestions and if he uses them fine, if not, okay. We wanted this to be grounded and slightly realistic in the similar vein to stop-motion, let the film breathe. We wanted it to have mystery and let it breathe.”

So, in addition to the cast and crew from “9,” what can we expect at Burton’s inaugural SDCC panel? The man himself wouldn’t reveal what footage he planned on showing. “Probably a sequence or two,” Burton teased.

And what happens if some indignant fan decides to confront the panel? “It’ll be interesting to see how it’s changed over the years,” said Burton.

(Source: MTV movie Blog)

9 official Site