Movie Review: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

Tulsa World

Flint Lockwood dreamed of becoming a great inventor. All he ever wanted was to help people, to help make the world a better place.

It's a good dream and a solid template for "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs," a sweet gem of an animated film. A genuinely funny movie for kids and adults alike, it's another hit for Tulsa actor Bill Hader, who voices Flint.

"Cloudy" is inspired by the beloved children's book by Judi and Ron Barrett. But it is quite different, which is to be expected when turning a six-minute read into a 90-minute film. There are added storylines and new characters, but the heart of the source material remains.

Life hasn't been working out the way that Flint envisioned. His loving but supportive mom died, and his loving but solemn father was left talking to his son in fishing metaphors, and all of his inventions -- spray-on shoes and hair underbalder among them -- didn't quite work out, comically so.

The bumbling inventions often wreck his small island town of Swallow Falls rather than help anyone. But now the lonely young man who still builds his creations in a backyard treehouse monstrosity has created his newest machine: Put water in, food comes out.

When the device is accidentally launched into the stratosphere, adding showers of water from clouds, the forecasts calls for changing weather three times a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Whatever you can imagine on the menu, it falls from the sky, and that concept makes the film a natural for 3-D. Watch out for the pancakes the size of Buicks.

The visual images are as impressive as the slapstick manner in which giant steaks crash onto diner's tables and in which a snowball fight breaks out among Flint's ice-cream winter wonderland, formed in scrumptious scoops.

The comedy is played against an ego-driven town mayor (Bruce Campbell of "Evil Dead" fame) who sees an opportunity to put himself and the island on the map (take a cruise to our buffet island is the buffoon's sales pitch).

The moral of the story (Bigger is better? Not if you've bitten off more than you can chew) grows more obvious as the mayor's waistline expands to gargantuan proportions. But this solid poke in the gut of America's obesity issues comes across with a subtlety that parents should appreciate.

That's thanks to all of the delicious jokes and to the sweetness of a romantic subplot involving a cable channel weather girl (Anna Faris) who hides her intelligence behind a perky facade until she meets the geeky Flint and embraces her own inner nerd.

The casting is impressive. Mr. T is perfect as the town's no- nonsense cop and Andy Samberg, Hader's "Saturday Night Live" pal, is a restrained joy as Flint's thought-translating monkey pal (another invention gone hilariously awry).

"Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" is a charmer. While Sony Pictures Animation is still a relative newcomer in this genre, its films such as "Monster House" and "Surf's Up" have been not only visually impressive but entertaining and thoughtful.

The success of this picture is due in no small part to Hader. His zany vocal abilities, seen often on "SNL" in impressions of Vincent Price and Al Pacino, are a natural for the young man in the boy's white lab coat who hasn't quite grown up, pretending his backyard houses a NASA-quality lab.

I liked the way that "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" made me laugh and made my kids laugh, usually at the same time, a sign that this is swell family film. Cloudy with a chance of meatballs

Stars: voices of Bill Hader, Anna Faris, James Caan, Bruce Campbell, Andy Samberg

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