Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Directors: Phil Lord and Chris Miller
Writers: Screenplay by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, based on the book by Judi Barrett and Ron Barrett
Producer: Pam Marsden
Featuring the Vocal Talents of: Bill Hader, Anna Faris, James Caan, Andy Samberg, Bruce Campbell, Mr. T, Bobb’e J. Thompson, Benjamin Bratt, Neil Patrick Harris
When writer/directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller were working on their cult MTV cartoon series Clone High, they coined the term “wacky stack” to describe a gag that was so deliriously embellished by one extra idea after another that it became too bloated to be useful anymore. It sounds as if even then they were in the correct state of mind to make Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, an adaptation of the beloved picture book about the tiny town of Chewandswallow, where food rained from the sky. This miraculous boon becomes an ecological nightmare when the comestibles become building-crushingly gigantic. This makes it pretty appealing as visual metaphors for the wacky stack phenomenon go.
Though the book’s narrative was scant, the visual implications of its premise are irresistible to kids old enough to identify the act of junk food gorging and young enough to not yet suffer acne because of it. Catapulting off the book, Lord and Miller have crafted an insouciant festival of gags aimed straight at that level of maturity, but seasoned with touches of Gen-Y wit and a consistently remarkable ability to push their ideas beyond ridiculousness and into deranged idiot bliss while never losing their grip on the story they intend to tell.
The created-for-the-movie protagonist is young Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader), an aspiring inventor who has spent too much of his life alone with his nerdy urges. Always more thrilled by what he can do than what is actually a smart thing to do, his inventions tend to be preordained for catastrophe – what good did he think would come from ratbirds? His home, the tiny island village Swallow Falls, is a morose place; it produces a bumper crop of sardines, but the world market for them has collapsed, and now the residents can’t afford to eat anything else except the “Super Gross” little fish.
Flint’s father Tim (James Caan), a gruff man who hides his feelings behind two bushy lines of hair (a unibrow and a mustache), hopes his son will grow beyond his inventing ambitions, and join him down at the family store. But Flint has a last grand inspiration, the Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator (FLDSMDFR for short), that can turn water into any form of food commanded of it. One thing leads to another, and the FLDSMDFR ends up in the sky, permanently altering the diet and attitude of the residents of Swallow Falls.
Flint relishes his new role as town hero and master chef, while the Mayor (Bruce Campbell) sees equal parts fame, wealth, and gluttony in his future. And the miracle food weather attracts the attention of aspiring weather girl Sam Sparks (Anna Faris), who inadvertently reveals that she understands more about Flint’s awkward super-genius side than most pretty girls on TV would.
The characters pursue all their individual obsessions with the maximum heedless enthusiasm – they move with a bounce and snap right out of Chuck Jones’ Looney Tunes heyday. Their voices are cast well, too – Hader takes a misfit who lives in his whiz-bang imagination and makes him about as cute as can be, while Campbell (who can even do smarmy without his famous chin on-screen) really milks the Mayor’s grandiose appetite. Even Neil Patrick Harris (co-star of How I Met Your Mother, for which Lord and Miller worked for a season), giving a performance that is mostly variations on less than a half-dozen words, gets maximum laugh impact.
Again and again the filmmakers are not just doing something funny, but pursuing its funniness to the last possible bite. I can only imagine that the first time they heard Mr. T, performing as the town’s hyper-athletic policeman Earl Devereuax, shout “Flint Lockwood!”, they fell to the floor, rolled around laughing a few times, then got up and started asking just how many more times they could fit that into the script. Some of the best gags of the movie’s climax emerge from a wrinkle I can’t bear to ruin for you, although I can say it will surely be the only movie you see this year with an action scene that hinges on peanut allergies.
The movie was released in 3-D. I did not view a 3-D show, but I can imagine more than one of the visuals, particularly as a food-storm of Biblical proportions develops, might have popped appealingly in the format. The first step to an animated film you want to see is to think of something an animator will enjoy drawing; and spectacles like gargantuan ice cream scoops and a pancake that crushes an elementary school surely provoked delight at many stages in the process.
Lord and Miller are young enough to speak the language of a generation only just beginning to assert itself in Hollywood. A telling detail is the way they build jokes around computers, e-mails, and viral video, in ways that understand and satirize their familiarity and omnipresence. This after the movie industry spent about 10 years making jokes, references, even whole movies that didn’t have a blazing clue how people actually interacted with computers in the real world. But this is just one example of how they prove in Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs that they aren’t just rookies with a single joke to tell. The work they’ve done before has brought them to this big canvas with a honed comic voice perfect for thoroughly exploiting the material. If one gag isn’t to your taste, another one is coming in fast – and you’re like to be buried under them by the end.