Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

Kurt Adams

This is a very well animated movie. Truly. Woo. Wish the story could have been as good. Nah I shouldn’t be so harsh. It was great for five year olds. Seriously funny story until they felt an economic requirement to add a boringly hopeless love story. Horrible. Really. The theme was great on many levels, but the delivery was only as good as the first bite of a Vienetta, looks good, but tastes like the back end of a water buffalo that ate too much Beef Vindaloo nine days ago in tropical Vietnam.

The animation suits the comic style of the movies really well. Its not realistic, yet has the right amount of cartoon plump to make it seem nice. Aesthetically it’s very pleasing. Everything has a round plumpy feel. Overly round. Massive heads and objects with odd angles create this cartoonish modern age cartoon.

The father is especially comical in appearance. He’s pretty fat with a mono brow and moustache. They serve as the features that actually hide all of his other facial features. There is one very funny moment when he has to raise his mono brow to reveal his eyes. Funny. It’s exactly like that scene in The Simpsons movie when they hide Bart’s doodle only to have it revealed suddenly. That which has been seen, cannot be unseen.

Steve the monkey is annoyingly in the way for the first 30 minutes of the film. Totally under utilised and just annoying. I hated him. I went as far as pretending he didn’t exist. I ignored him. But, at some point he is brought back to life with a whole bunch of one line sidekick jokes that make him one of, if not the only funny character.

The policeman was also pretty funny, I don’t remember his name, probably because he doesn’t repeat his name like the monkey does. But he was memorable for the fact that he was a big bad arse policeman with heart. The most real character of them all.

So the basic story is a bad inventor invents something interesting however it goes bad and gets sent into the atmosphere, hence it rains food. Tying into this story is the first time weather girl being sent to cover the story without a chance. Basically, people who try, fail, then they succeed in the face of defeat. They’re like dancing the funky chicken for Death’s pleasure and it’s the fastest way to the door. But one good turn leads to another bad turn. The machine goes bad because other people have their own interests involved. Too many fingers in the pie of crazy sky food machines. But the good in people always prevails… In movies. I hate these hopeless repeated storylines. Boy likes girl, is too retarded to see it, thinks she’s too good for him. And then they decide they love each other at the height of the climax. Why is it always the same story? Seriously. These people call themselves writers yet they spend all their time writing the same shit over and over. Different time and place doesn’t constitute a story.

Overall the jokes were funny. I would recommend on that alone. It’s not very well written, there were no twists or turns that I didn’t see coming before I even sat down to watch it. There are some important themes to watch unfold, but nothing to die worrying over.