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?