Movie Review: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Many people I’ve talked to don’t know that Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is based on a children's book originally printed in 1979. It’s a short story about a couple of kids whose grandpa tells them about a far off land where food rains from the sky. There are no stores in the land of Chewandswallow, because the townspeople just wait for their next meal to fall in their lap, literally.

Well, Sony has taken this one-time bestselling children’s book, and turned it into the next CGI animated film, featuring a plethora of famous voices. In order to flesh the story out a bit more, Sony scrapped the original storybook idea of a grandpa telling a tall tale to his grandkids and opted for something that could run 90 minutes.

Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader) has always wanted to be a great inventor ever since he was little and his mom gave him his very own lab coat. The only problem is Flint’s inventions seem to always go a bit haywire.

Flint lives on a tiny island hidden on the map under the “A” in “Atlantic.” The town was thriving off the profits from sardine sales, until the world found out that sardines were “super gross,” plunging the town into a state of poverty where all they had to eat were sardines that were prepared in a variety of different ways, even candied.

Flint takes it upon himself to save the town by creating a machine that can create food from water. After a mishap trying to get the machine to work, and ruining the opening of the town's newest attraction, the machine shoots up into the sky out of sight. Flint is shunned by the townspeople again, and his dad (voiced by James Gandolfini) is less than impressed.

Article Author: Aaron Peck

All of Aaron's reviews first appear in print for The Herald Journal Cache Magazine. He's also running the fledgling film site The Reel Place.com.

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