“You know what you are, Flint Lockwood? A shenaniganizer! A tomfool!”
I chose the sequence in Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (the first one) released in 2009!
I love this movie so much, it’s one of my favorites so I had to do it for this!!!! Todd Hemker was the co-director for it and it was produced by Yellowshed and DUCK studios.
My starting inspiration was literally just that this movie is always sort of lurking in the back of my mind and when the topic of the week was announced to be title sequences it popped back into my head. It’s overall a super fun film and it’s actually really well done besides just the ending (which is awesome).
However I do NOT like the second movie. It was not really up my alley and I believe they definitely got sidetracked by the need to profit, which ended up making the sequel less enjoyable. (this isn’t really relevant to my blog but I feel like I need to state it because I do believe the second movie had so much potential if they had just taken a different direction with it)
A few main inspirations I was able to find were things like Muppets, Schoolhouse Rock, Monty Python, etc…… It has a very fun, surreal aesthetic that mixes very colorful cartoony graphics and characters with oddly realistic elements like the rendered hand combined with sparkly rainbow animation. It gives the sequence a very childish and whimsical vibe that also pays homage to looking more like paper animation in some parts. The “Trail” as Briana put it in class goes more in the direction of old and silly animation and using that to combine with the modern animation of the time- (it WAS 2009, so of course it’s a little outdated now).
Something I found really interesting was that the original plan for the animatic was basically completely scrapped due to timing issues. Because they had to get each persons’ name on screen for the same amount of time, they had to change their original mayor animatic to one that featured the characters outside of it and each one had to have somewhat subdued animation so it didn’t take away or distract from the credit names. It sucks to me that they had to waste potential good character animation that would really show each of their personalities so that the credits could be seen in more focus, but I guess that’s part of compromising in order to make sure you get what you want- still I think it’s sad, but it’s still such a great ending sequence regardless
WORKS CITED:
Wholahay Animation. “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs Ending Title.” Blogspot.com, 31 Jan. 2025, r-wong253249-sp.blogspot.com/2014/04/cloudy-with-chance-of-meatballs-ending.html. Accessed 31 Jan. 2025.
Ulloa, Writer Alexander, et al. “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.” Www.artofthetitle.com, www.artofthetitle.com/title/cloudy-with-a-chance-of-meatballs/.
“Todd Hemker & Soyeon Kim.” The Art of the Title Sequence., 2025, jemmayarkertitlesequence.weebly.com/todd-hemker–soyeon-kim.html. Accessed 31 Jan. 2025.