Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs (Sony Animation)
Food, Glorious Food
Sony Animation has a winner with its new animated film Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs. The story of a young man, who wants to please his father but also wants to strike his own path, is not funny enough to keep the children totally entertained but it does pleasantly please adults along for the ride.
Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader) lives on a small island where everything is made from fish. The community dreams of varieties of food but none are available. One day Flint invents a machine that changes moisture in the sky to different kinds of food, so when it rains it rains food.
Sam Sparks (voiced by Anna Farris) is a weather reporter. She comes to the island for a story and ends up being involved with Flint when the food converter goes awry. She, Flint, local celebrity Baby Brent (Andy Samberg), and a pilot named Manny (Benjamin Bratt) must all band together to make a final effort to save the world.
The film is fun to watch but there are very few laugh out loud jokes. The story is inventive and has good messages on several fronts. One of the best concerns the relationship between Flint and his father (James Caan). Flint wants his father to be proud of him and to love him but his father has a hard time verbalizing his emotions. How this is resolved is one of the most tender moments of the movie.
Adults who attend this film with their children will probably get more out of the plot than the kids. They will appreciate all the clever words and the nuances of the story. So the task of taking the kids to the movie will turn out to be more of a pleasure for them.
The film is rated PG for comic violence.
Smaller children might be frightened by the intensity of the actions of the band of people trying to save the world. Several characters lives are put in jeopardy, but the overall outcome will assuage any fears.
Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs is a fun film but not a terribly funny one. It has great characters and an inventive storyline. Kids will enjoy it and adults will get more out of it than they thought they would.
I scored Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs a stormy 6 out of 10.
