ANI-MOVIES, *Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs

With the prior success of Open Season and Surfs Up scoring them some points in theatres, Sony Pictures Animation followed up with a movie based on the children’s story from the 1970s by Judi & Ron Barrett. This relatively short book was concieved into being a full-length motion picture by Chris Miller and Phil Lord, who created the cult MTV animated series, Clone High.

Set on a small island off the American east coast, Flint Lockwood is a tinkerer who has spent a good portion of his life coming up with invention-after-invention, all of which have failed, including his spray-on shoes which have never come off since he put tested them on himself as a kid. His father wants him to help around his tackle shop, but Flint tries one more take at achieving his dream of being a great inventor. He makes a machine that is supposed to transform water into any kind of desired food, but he ends up accidently sending it into the atmosphere which starts turning the moisture in the air into random food. Flint manages to set up a way of controlling the machine so that he can make it rain whatever food the townspeople want. The greedy mayor convinces him to help use this as a tourist attraction for the town, but Flint mainly wants to do this to impress Sam, the cute weather reporter from New York reporting on the falling food phenomenon. He even goes to the lengths of making an entire castle made of jello to win her over. Unfortunately, the machine goes haywire, and starts dropping giant entries all over the globe. Flint and Sam, along with their mistmatched crew, head off in Flint’s jet car(which now has wings!)into the eye of the food-storm, and manage to stop the machine before the entire world is covered in takeout, even though everyone in the town has to escape on pizza-boats.

I’ll was really impressed with the animation in this. What really bought it for me was the cartoonish look of the characters and the world they lived in, while keeping it very detailed and slightly realistic. The movie goes the extra step to ellaborate from the original source material of how the small town started having it rain food. It pays homage to alot of disaster flicks, and this shows with the hilarious scenes of entire cities being ravaged by falling giant pancakes. There are some intensely funny moments in this, and I loved all the running gags with Flint’s failed former experiments. It’s a clever comedy for the whole family, and any film that has both Bruce Campbell and Mr. T in it is a solid win!