Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2

For anyone wishing to tickle the tummy-buns of a Double Bacon Cheespider, there's a menagerie of colourful mutants to distract your attention from the absence of anything more substantial.

The original Cloudy didn't have the warmth of Despicable Me or the snark of Shrek. But it did have more humour than this new film.

This film runs on cute ... and the result is a trip that goes nowhere at all.

Obligation rivals inspiration in this passable sequel to 2009's zappy, gastro-themed digimation.

Here is another happy, psychedelic digimation for kids, its two-dimensional characters delirium'd into 3D.

It's no triumph of screenwriting or subtext. But it's a feast of ingeniously rendered gastronomic insanity - and that'll do.

As an animated film, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 will bring lots of laughs for kids. They hardly wrote this with parents or adults in mind but it still works in many ways.

Cody Cameron and Kris Pearn (working from a script by John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein, and Erica Rivinoja) have expanded on it nicely, crafting a film that feels like the natural successor to the original without simply rehashing its story.

The movie's imagination, inventiveness and humor are its selling points.

Sony Pictures Animation certainly knows how to make an entertaining animated feature.