Flint Lockwood returns in mouthwatering sequel Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 hits Cineworld very soon!

When Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs hit cinemas in 2009, it quickly joined the ranks of such bullet-proof classics as Toy Story, Up and Shrek as an animated movie that was embraced as much by adults as it was by kids.

The first film followed young inventor Flint Lockwood, who dreams up a machine that rains food down into the town of Swallow Falls. The sequel has Flint discovering that his invention is still working and has created a race of mutant food/animal hybrids, including tacodiles, shrimpanzees, apple pie-thons, hippotatomuses and cheespiders.

So if the first film was a quirky, irreverent take on the disaster film genre, Cloudy 2 is a unique spin on the monster movie, and directors Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn have gleefully lobbed in lots of cool film references for eagle-eyed adults to spot.

“We have some nods to Jurassic Park,” says Cameron, “ and to The Goonies and Teen Wolf and a lot of little references to films we grew up with in the 1980s. There are nods to Spielberg and Richard Donner films and Joe Dante. It’s kind of like those fun adventure comedies we grew up with. When you climb into the nerd sandbox it’s hard to climb back out!”

Promoted from story artists on the first movie to co-directors on Cloudy 2, Cameron and Pearn have taken over from the first film’s directing team of Phil Lord and Chris Miller.

“Phil and Chris were such like comedy guys, but you could tell that Chris and Cody in the second movie are animation guys,” says Superbad star and voice of Flint, Bill Hader. “When you would talk to them it was always about the kind of the visuals of what you were seeing, which was really cool. In this movie, the scope of it which makes sense because the scope of the second movie is so much bigger than the first movie, the scope is just crazy!"

Apart from Hader, Anna Faris returns as Sam’s weather intern Sam Sparks and James Caan as his Flint’s tough-talking father, Tim, with former American football star Terry Crews replacing the departed Mr T as town cop Officer Devereaux.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 rains into Cineworld on 25 October.