Get your eyes (plates?) ready to feast on a delicious new Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs sequel that’s apparently so tasty that almost all of its lead voice cast has returned for seconds. End food puns. Sony Pictures Animation has today announced, quite unsurprisingly, that the voice cast for Cloudy 2: Revenge of the Leftovers will include “Bill Hader as inventor Flint Lockwood; Anna Faris as brainy weather girl Sam Sparks; James Caan as Flint’s technophobic dad, Tim Lockwood; Andy Samberg as Swallow Falls’ local celebrity “Baby” Brent; Neil Patrick Harris as Steve the gummy bear-loving monkey; and Benjamin Bratt as Sam’s mild mannered cameraman Manny.”
Joining the cast is Will Forte as “world-famous super-inventor” and head of the Live Corp Company Chester V (Forte played a background character named Joe Towne in the first film), Kristen Schaal as Chester’s talking orangutan Barb (essentially, she’s his Steve), and Terry Crews as local cop Earl (a role that was first played by Mr. T, who reportedly declined an offer to return).
The film will return us to the trials and travails of young Flint as he continues on his quest to be recognized as the genius that he is, with his seemingly shutdown food machine back to haunt him.
EW offers a fresh synopsis for the film, telling us “Live Corp has been charged with cleaning up the island after Flint’s contraption that turned water into food led to a mess of huge pancakes, pizza slices and, of course, meatballs garnishing the pulverized town in the original film. But in the sequel, the machine is still sputtering away somewhere — only now it’s pumping out living pickles, a walking, gibberish-talking strawberry named Barry, and creatures like the giant, french-fry-legged bacon cheesespider, which lords over the abandon town like a massive cholesterol-spiking tarantula.”
Whereas the first film was (very) loosely based on Judi and Ron Barrett’s 1978 book, the only thing that this new film has in common with that book’s sequel (“Pickles to Pittsburgh”) is “rather active pickles,” as Sony Pictures Animation producer Kirk Bodyfelt amusingly describes them. Considering that the first film strayed so far from its source material and was still a big success, this new take on the material isn’t a cause for concern.
While the first film’s directors, Phil Lord and Chris Miller, are not returning to helm this installment, they are are executive producing, and the directorial team taking their place has a history with Cloudy: Cody Cameron was a story artist on that film and Kris Pearn was head of story on the production. John Francis Daley & Jonathan Goldstein and Erica Rivinoja wrote this latest script.
Cloudy 2: Revenge of the Leftovers opens in 3D on February 7, 2014. [Sony, via ComingSoon]