Based on the beloved children’s book with the same title (written by Judi & Ron Barrett and published 1n 1978), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs brings to life the story of a decaying sardine town where the weather suddenly becomes food flavored.
While colorful and imaginative, the world created by Sony Pictures’ film doesn’t come close to the highly-accurate, humanized representations that Pixar Animation’s audiences have grown accustomed to over the past decade (Ratatouille, Up). It’s a world inhabited by big-headed people with bulgy eyes, surrounded by oversized, primal representations of objects. Nevertheless, this fearless fantasy represents a return to the original credo of the Walt Disney animations (Dumbo, Lady and the Tramp), which used surreal representations and settings to relay highly human stories. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is not only entertaining, but also more effective than many documentaries in depicting our society’s inclination toward greed and easy fixes.
The Swallow Falls Universe
The hero of the story is Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader), a nerdy amateur inventor who is obsessed with discovering something that will improve his townspeople’s lives. During his lonely childhood and teenage years, Flint comes up with several dead end inventions: spray-on shoes (which he can no longer remove), rat-birds and a thought interpreting device, implanted in his pet monkey, Steve (voiced by Neil Patrick Harris), who becomes the sociopathic Flint’s only friend. But his chance to shine comes when the world suddenly stops eating sardines and Flint’s home town is facing bleak economic prospects, including starvation. That is when Flint creates an ingenious device able to manipulate the genetic makeup of water and turn it into food. Accidentally, the device is propelled into space and cheeseburgers, pancakes and pasta start falling like rain over Flint’s town. It is a dream come true both for the sardine-eating people of the depressed Swallow Falls and for the greedy Mayor Shelbourne (voiced by Bruce Campbell) who sees the opportunity in a town where food literally falls from the sky.
The episodic appearance of Flint’s mother, Fran (voiced by Lauren Graham) at the beginning of the story, as well as Flint’s relationship with his technology-resistant father Tim (voiced by James Caan) give Flint’s character emotional depth. Tim is an introverted, conservative fisherman, who speaks in fishing metaphors and believes in doing things the traditional way. After his mother’s premature death, Flint secludes himself in his improvised lab in the backyard, misunderstood by his father and by the whole town. Flint’s mother’s character, however, carries the emotional through line of the story. Although she leaves the screen early, her presence can be sensed throughout the movie as the one person who believes in Flint. Sam Sparks (voiced by Anna Faris), a weather girl who tries to hide her smarts behind a perky appearance, echoes Fran Lockwood with her trust in Flint’s potential. Flint’s mother is also metaphorically present when Tim Lockwood realizes he had been wrong not to believe in his son and he symbolically hands Flint the lab coat which had been a gift from his mother.
Every hero needs a sidekick and, surprisingly, Flint finds his in “Baby” Brent (voiced by Andy Samberg), a symbol of the town’s crumbling prosperity. While “Baby” Brent starts out as the town bully, who has been harassing Flint since elementary school, he eventually comes through as the unlikely hero, “Chicken” Brent, who lends Flint a hand in his damage control mission.
When the Desire to Help Meets Greed
Cloudy is not only an emotionally satisfying story, it is also a satire about greed. Mayor Shelbourne is a populist politician who wants to become “big”. When food starts falling like rain from the sky, he renames the town Chewandswallow and plans to exploit it as a major tourist attraction. But enough is never enough for the rapacious Mayor Shelbourne. He manipulates Flint into abusing his invention, until the food-producing device turns into a weather calamity that threatens to destroy not only Chewandswallow, but the entire world. By the end of the story, the mayor has become literally big. While attempting to flee the town and save himself (before everybody else), he slips to the bottom of the ocean after eating the rescue raft made out of pancakes.
The Parody of Disaster
With its funny interactions between the colorful characters and its multi-layered story, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is a movie for all ages. It has both the natural, laugh-out-loud humor that entertains audiences and the more subtle humor of a satire. Moreover, with its depiction of spaghetti tornadoes and meatball hurricanes that threaten to wipe out the entire population of the planet, Cloudy is an excellent parody of the disaster films that have been hitting movie theaters for decades.
- Distributed by: Sony Pictures Animation
- Directed by: Phil Lord & Chris Miller
- Written by: Judi Barrett & Ron Barrett (book)
- Runtime: 90 minutes
