Photo: Sony Pictures
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (Photo: Sony Pictures)
Since its premiere last month, Sony Pictures' animated film Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs has been stirring up a real, well, storm in a teacup. Featuring the voices of Bill Hader, Anna Faris and Andy Samberg, the movie tells the story of an outcast inventor who creates a machine that rains food on his hungry town and got him the attention of the girl he's always loved.
Intoxicated by the love and validation he receives, he goes too far with his machine: the falling food gets dangerously out of control, he loses the girl, and he has to set things right to win her back.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is the second animated film to be made using Sony's animation rendering software, Arnold, and the open source image toolkit OpenImageIO. And in honour of the film's release this week, MSN Entertainment offers up twelve other little known facts about your favourite animated movies and characters.
Reuters Photo
FACT #1
The infamous wildebeest stampede scene in The Lion King, which was less than three minutes long, was hard work; it took Disney's CG department approximately three years to animate that one sequence.
FACT #2
The art director for Beauty and the Beast, Brian McEntee, made sure that Belle was the only person in her 'little town' who wore blue, doing the same for Beast, later on, to ensure audiences saw both characters as being different from the rest.
FACT #3
The wind sounds in Wall-E’s wasteland home was actually recorded at Niagara Falls in Ontario, Canada. And the cockroach's chirps were created by speeding up recorded sounds of a raccoon.
AP File Photo
FACT #4
The Incredibles director Brad Bird made Spencer Fox, who voiced the superfast Dash, run two laps around the studio to give Dash a realistic out-of-breath voice.
FACT #5
The line "You're on your way to a smacked bottom" uttered by Shrek was not actually in the script. In the recording studio, Mike Myers got so annoyed at one of the directors that he improvised the line.
FACT #6
An average human character, in Pixar's Ratatouille, had about 110,000 hairs rendered. A great number fewer than Remy the rat, who had around 1.15 million hairs rendered.
Photo: Image.net
FACT #7
It’s always a challenge to make the CGI graphics in films look believable, but Pixar animators made the water surface in Finding Nemo so realistic, they were told to make it look more fake so that the audience wouldn't think it was real footage of the ocean surface.
FACT #8
The villain in Up, Charles Muntz, was named after a former Universal Pictures executive named Charles Mintz. In 1982, Mintz stole Walt Disney's production rights to the highly-successful Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon series. Because of that, Walt Disney created the iconic Mickey Mouse.
FACT #9
In Cars, Batman Returns star Michael Keaton is the voice of the security guard who yells "Hey, no press!" during the instant replay sequence after the first race.
AP File Photo
FACT #10
Bill Murray was initially picked to voice the character Sulley in Monsters, Inc. but producers were unable to contact him and they took his lack of a response to mean "no", begining production with Rosseane actor John Goodman instead.
FACT #11
Although rapper MC Hammer wasn’t a part of Disney's Aladdin, he played quite a significant role in the movie. To capture the movement of Aladdin's low-cut baggy pants, animator Glen Keane studied MC Hammer’s rap videos.
FACT #12
In The Little Mermaid, Disney had to outsource the drawings of millions of bubbles to a China-based production firm, because the director insisted that every one of the millions of bubbles be hand-drawn.
