Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs - "For Cast, Good, with Pratfalls"

Screenplay and Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller

Way back in the distant past known as 2002, MTV was already making the transition from music videos to more half hour programming and Total Request Live was at the height of popularity. There was an animated program that lasted only one season that almost no one watched called “Clone High” and it was the brain child of Phil Lord, Chris Miller, and Bill Lawrence. Lawrence, who was coming off the success of Michael J. Fox-starrer Spin City, was also launching his eventual hit Scrubs at this time, and ‘High’ had almost the entire cast of Scrubs voicing characters. Clone High was absurd, hilarious and had a great twist on science much like its spiritual brother, Miller and Lord’s latest project Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.

‘Cloudy’ is a freeform prequel to the classic children’s book it is based on, an even looser take than Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are. It sets up a completely new story in the ‘Meatballs’ world, showing in essence how the rain of food first began in the town of Chewandswallow, primarily a sardine fishing town before the rain began. Our hero is one Flint Lockwood (SNL’s Bill Hader), a young man who has known since he was a boy that he would be a great inventor. Naturally, all of his inventions are humorously ill-conceived, like spray on shoes (that can never be taken off) or “rat-birds”, which now plague the town. One day the world realizes that Sardines are gross and the fishing industry all but dries up, leaving the entire town to sustain themselves on an exclusive diet of the salty mini-fish.

Flint decides to make a machine which converts simple water into all the foods that the town never gets to eat. He and his monkey sidekick Steve (Neil Patrick Harris) plan to unveil the device while the town is gathered for the Mayor’s presentation of a new Sardine Land to promote tourism for the remote island town. Through a series of events everything goes awry and the machine ends up in sky, where it begins feeding on the precipitation of clouds and causing a rain of whatever foods Flint requests of it from his computer. A perky young weathergirl named Sam Sparks (Anna Faris) gets involved, and is now covering the ongoing unique meteorological events and brings about one of the best lines of the film, “You may have seen a meteor shower, but I bet you've never seen a shower "meatier" than this.”

Naturally, everything goes to hell by the third act. The story is weak and predictable but it is precisely the above quoted type of pun-laden and blink-and-you-miss-it humor that helps keep the film afloat like a sandwich boat. Most of the credit can be attributed to the cast that Lord and Miller have assembled, who know how deliver the lines to maximally accentuate this heavily cartoonish world. While this reviewer has a low opinion of celebrity casts in general, which take jobs away from excellent voice actors, no one here is too showy. In fact, it came as a surprise who was actually voicing most of the characters when the end credits rolled (James Caan played Flint’s father?!). Frankly, who could have predicted that Neil Patrick Harris was behind the talking monkey Steve, who mostly just says his own name in a computerized voice via monkey thought translator? The only celebrity who made their presence known during the course of the film is Mr. T as Earl, because frankly, you always know Mr. T when you hear him.

Animation’s possibilities are fully taken advantage of as characters like Earl have a Tex Avery-like elasticity to their movements. I would also say that the color palette throughout is as wonderfully colorful as the characters who inhabit this world. Clearly, a lot of work went into the accurate rendering of food, and things like how a cheeseburger would fall apart as it hits the ground. While Disney pioneered the animation of humans and animals, I would say that ‘Meatballs’ has reaches a new pedestal for food animation (as silly as that may be). Though the film was clearly made for a 3D presentation (and was released as such this year), there are never gags that rely solely on that and detract from the 2D presentation of the film. In fact, the depth of field that is beginning to develop in CG animated films in general as a result of thinking for 3D is, in this reviewer’s humble opinion, a step forward for the whole medium. While this is not the strongest animated film this year, it is a fun movie, something to watch when you want to relax.


*** Three Stars – Take it or leave it

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs releases today on DVD and Blu-ray Disc. It has been nominated for a Best Animated Feature Golden Globe Award.