We watched Cloudy With Meatballs last night and it was awesome. Of course, it was only awesome if you like animated movies for children, which I do. For one thing, they are movies you can watch with children, and children are fun people to watch movies with, because they don’t all think they are movie critics the way adults do. My kids are a bit beyond the kids’ movies age, but Isabel was enthusiastic about this one, and only Sam (16) stayed in his room and refused to enjoy the silliness.
Cloudy With Meatballs, in addition to being a kids’ movie, is also a science-fiction movie, which is another genre I love. Of course, it didn’t delve seriously into the science (water goes in this end, and then it’s converted into food, which comes out here) but, even on Star Trek, the science is mostly big words and magic. I like those films which take the science more seriously as well (The Martian, for example. Also, a lot of the AI films which have come out in the last few years), but not exclusively.
I mean, it would have been interesting if they’d looked at his experiment and said, “Hey, how can we scale this down to a controllable level, mass produce them, get the sale price down, and end world hunger” but, “Let’s turn the town into a tourist trap and make a lot of money” made for a funny film, too, with the ever increasingly fat mayor.
I also liked all his other inventions that they allowed to play a part: the spray-on shoes, the flying car, the monkey translator.
Mostly, though, I think the film probably originated when a bunch of writers went on a pun binge, as writerly types tend to do, and realized that between food puns and weather puns, they could string together a whole movie, and so they did. And it was funny.
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