Sardinism
Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs is a terrific movie. Perhaps a touch smug with how clever it is in places, but its a solid narrative which confounds clichés at most turns whilst stuffing the slyest of sidegags and slapstick moments to keep every audience happy. It doesn’t try to be the kind of complete package that most Pixar films head for, it knows its a silly little kids movie, but it also knows that that is every reason to have as much fun as possible. And if that fun involves snowball fights with ice cream, hordes of attacking roast chickens or the bizarre sight of a whole island evacuating on rafts made of toast, so be it. It uses its computer animation as a tool to make its own cartoony world more dynamic. It would probably be not all that annoying in 3D (as ever these days, 2D did it for me). Indeed it is almost the perfect package.
Except. The whole film is predicated on the terrible problem that faces the small island of Swallow Falls. Their only major export was canned sardines, and thus when the company went bust, it left a massive backlog of sardines on the island. Thus all the islanders get to eat is sardines. And in a film which is so sunny, happy and dares to be different in so many ways* it is therefore a pity that the poor, humble, tinned sardine is the villain. Even going to the point of having a newspaper headline saying that sardines are super gross. Let me tell you here and now, TINNED SARDINES ARE A THING OF BEAUTY AND A JOY FOREVER. AND I FOR ONE WILL NOT REST UNTIL THE TIN, THE SARDINE AND ITS ASSOCIATED OIL MASHED UP AND PUT ON A WELL TOASTED PIECE OF BREAD IS THE CENTREPIECE OF A MASTERCHEF WINNING MENU.
There. What shall I have for tea tonight?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNRBqIDadKw
*How many films get their heroine to put their glasses on and tie their hair back to achieve maximum beauty?
Pete Baran in Do You See /FT • Film • 123 views
whatwhatwhat this is not the plot of the book! which was one of my favourite things ever, as a v tiny child.
Answer to the asterisked question: Adrienne Shelly in Trust, for one.
Tell me more Moggy. I don’t think the film would disappoint, but I guessed the book might not have a Mr T voiced cop character who wears very tight speedos.
i actually can’t totally remember the book (last time i read it i was probably under school age) but basically there’s a place called chewandswallow where food rains down at convenient meal times in convenient combinations and this is all fantastic, except then the weather goes mad at some point and starts giving really horrible combinations (sprouts and something at a child’s birthday party is what sticks in my brain) and finally goes totally rogue and starts attacking them with huge things, so they all use the giant food to get away and go to the normal world, which i suppose is possibly similar to the film? i remember distinctly the last picture was a sunrise or sunset that looked like a fried egg.
i don’t remember any mr t but to be fair i wouldn’t've known who that was. film looks pretty good, mind.
Dares to be different in many ways, except that thin is still good and fat is still evil!
NB I still wuv the film, but just because the amount of really great things in it overcame that really grating theme.
Not sure that theme is necessarily explicit in the film. It is true that the one bad character (evil seems a bit strong or a character that is more stupid than Machiavellian) is the only one that gets fatter. But then the film has a difficult line with greed considering the excess of food that is suddenly bombarded on them. Body shapes differ quite significantly and I would say that Flint’s Dad and Earl are both fatish. The mayor’s corpulence is clearly a direct manifestation of his greed, hence his growing literally before our eyes in the film.
Also consider the underlying subtext of the film is that junk food brings unending pleasure.
Oh, that’s what made the weather go wrong in the book, too! People started just eating cake all the time or something and this angered the meteorological cuisine. It is all coming back to me now. I might have to see the film!