Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs falls under the category of beloved children's classic picture book turned into a full length feature film.  This is often a bad idea.  Thankfully this is not the case with this one.  The stellar cast is reminiscent of an episode of SNL.  Led by Bill Hader and Anna Faris, the voice talents include Mr. T, Bruce Campbell, Andy Samberg, Will Forte, Neil Patrick Harris, Benjamin Bratt, Al Roker and more.

The 1978 book, by Judi Barrett, tells of the town Chewandswallow, whose weather is highly unusual - raining things like soup and juice and snowing mashed potatoes.  One day the weather changed - the food grew into dangerous sizes, forcing the town to evacuate.  The movie faithfully takes that premise and expands upon it, giving the weather an origin and reason, introducing us to inventor Flint Lockwood (Hader) who reminds me of Dexter from Cartoon Network.  Flint, in a bid to save the town of (then) Swallow Falls, develops a machine that turns water into food but accidentally launches it into the stratosphere.  Eager weather woman Sam Sparks (Farris) just happens to be on the scene, and the rest is history.  Following the story line of the book almost exactly - as exactly as an hour of a film can follow a 30 page picture book - the weather predictably gets out of hand.  In the meantime, Sam strikes some sparks with Flint - excellent pun intended.

It's after the first hour or so that the film really takes a turn from the source material as ending the story with evacuation would be too much of a letdown given the way the film had been going to that point, so a bizarre plan is launched and the weirdness hill just gets slipperier from that point on.  Kung Fu roasted chickens anyone?

This movie, despite being based on a simple book, and seeming doomed to fail by virtue of taking a beloved short story and turning it into a full blown movie with an actual plot, is wonderfully witty, and creatively clever.  I don't often laugh out loud at movies, but there was something about this "kid's movie" that had me lawling, as some would say.  I'm not sure what exactly it was, but something about this movie just clicked..  From the way Flint self narrates his actions including "saying what I'm doing" to the painfully true representation of how the older generation views computers, every element worked to make this a genuinely funny experience.  My expectations going in were mediocre and most of my hope was based on the fact that the cast sounded interesting.  Coming out, I can say truthfully that Pixar is not the only animation studio out there worthy of five stars.

***** (5/5 stars)