MOVIE NEWS: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

First things first: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is both a classic children’s book and a brand-new movie. I haven’t read Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, but I saw Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs last week. So there you go.

In the movie version, Cloudy is the story of a young inventor named Flint Lockwood. When his town hits hard times, he invents something he thinks everyone will love: a machine that turns water into food and sends it falling from the sky.

Unlike a lot of Flint’s other inventions, the machine actually works — his town becomes world famous, and suddenly he has more friends and fans than he can handle. The only problem is it might work too well. As the food gets bigger and bigger, Flint needs to make a tough decision. Turn the invention off or risk letting it spiral out of control.

Here are a few observations about the movie:

1) It’s funny! Honestly, seriously funny. I mean, the characters are funny. The dialogue is funny. Even the problems are funny. Funny, funny, funny. Funny. Can’t say it enough.

2) Unlike a lot of recent animated movies, Cloudy doesn’t star a ton of super-famous voice actors. But that’s not a bad thing. Because I didn’t recognize most of the voices, I wasn’t thinking about the voice actors at all. That made the characters all the more real and alive.

3) It has several good messages, including a) “Be yourself,” b) “If at first you don’t succeed, try try again,” and one you don’t often see in movies, c) “Bigger isn’t always better.”

In case you hadn’t guessed by now, I pretty much loved Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. It’s one of my two favourite animated movies of the year — along with Up. I recommend it to anyone who likes truly zany comedies and loves to laugh.

The movie opened in theatres on Friday. If you go see it, let me know what you think in the comments below!

Craig, owlblog@owlkids.com