The machine that turns water into food was never supposed to work. That is the joke at the center of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and it is also why the film holds up better than its premise suggests.
Flint Lockwood is an aspiring inventor on Swallow Falls, an island in the Atlantic whose economy runs entirely on sardine sales. When the rest of the world decides sardines are unsavory, the islanders are left to eat them all themselves. Flint’s answer is the Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator, a device that converts water into food through what the film calls genetic mutation. It overloads, rockets into the sky, and starts raining cheeseburgers.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
The food replicator and the substation accident
The setup is efficient. Flint connects the machine to a local substation. The overload destroys a new sardine-themed amusement park meant to revive the island’s economy, which aggravates the islanders and makes Flint a local failure. He heads to the harbor, where he meets Samantha “Sam” Sparks, a meteorologist from New York City whose big break the accident thwarted. Then the sky opens. Flint works out that the machine is now functioning in the stratosphere, using condensation from clouds to build food-based weather systems. Swallow Falls is rechristened Chewandswallow and becomes a food tourism destination. Flint gets popular. He and Sam fall in love.
That middle stretch is where the film is most confident. The food weather is a clean visual idea, and directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who also wrote the script, keep finding new ways to land it. A cheeseburger squall is funny once. A town rebuilding its identity around what falls from the sky is a sharper joke, and the film knows it.
Bill Hader, Anna Faris and the voice cast
Bill Hader voices Flint with a nervous, fast-talking energy that fits an inventor who has spent his life being wrong in public. Anna Faris plays Sam as a professional trying to hold onto a career that keeps slipping, and the two have an easy rhythm together. James Caan is Tim Lockwood, Flint’s widowed fisherman father, a man of few words who communicates mostly through the tackle shop and through silence. The relationship between Flint and Tim is the film’s spine, and Caan gives it weight without pushing.
The supporting cast is stacked. Bruce Campbell voices Mayor Shelbourne, the island’s now-morbidly obese mayor, who ignores Flint’s warnings that the machine is malfunctioning. Mr. T plays Earl Devereaux, a cop. Andy Samberg is “Baby” Brent. Neil Patrick Harris voices Steve, Flint’s pet. Benjamin Bratt is Manny. Al Roker plays Patrick Patrickson. Lauren Graham is Fran Lockwood. Will Forte is Joe Towne. Bobb’e J. Thompson voices Cal Devereaux. It is a deep bench for a 90-minute animated comedy, and the film uses most of it.
The spaghetti tornado and the rogue machine
The back half turns. Tim notices the food has begun to over-mutate, growing larger and less molecularly stable. Flint warns the mayor, who remains unconcerned. A spaghetti-made tornado tears through town. Flint tries to deactivate the machine, but the mayor inadvertently destroys the communication device while trying to stop him, and the machine goes rogue, producing a massive storm. Flint has to regain control and end the weather before the town is destroyed.
The escalation is where the film starts to strain. The premise is elastic, but the third act trades the small-town comedy for a disaster sequence, and the disaster is less interesting than the town. Chewandswallow as a tourism economy is a better idea than Chewandswallow under a spaghetti tornado. The film also has a habit of solving problems with another invention rather than with the characters, which flattens the ending.
A script that survived two firings
The production history is more dramatic than anything in the movie. Lord and Miller worked on the script for a year before being fired over story issues. They were replaced by new writers, who were also fired after a year. Lord and Miller were re-hired in 2006 and redid the script completely, this time with creative input from their crew. The new draft made the protagonist a failed inventor who wanted to prove himself to his town.
They were almost fired a third time after Amy Pascal, then head of Sony Pictures, criticized the film for lack of story. Pascal cited the lack of an anchoring relationship as a failure in the storytelling, even though the film was working comedically at the animatic stage. Unable to create new characters and environments to suit the new demands, Lord and Miller promoted the tackle shop extra to the protagonist’s father. That is where Tim Lockwood came from.
It shows. The father-son material is the most grounded thing in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and it arrived because a studio executive asked for it. The film’s best emotional beat is a production note.
Release schedule and where the film landed
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| September 12, 2009 | Premiere at the Mann Village Theater, Los Angeles |
| September 18, 2009 | United States release |
| 2009 | Nomination, Best Animated Feature, 67th Golden Globe Awards |
| 2013 | Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 released |
| 2017 | Animated television series premiered |
The film was a box office success, grossing $243 million against a budget of $100 million. It received positive reviews from critics and was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 67th Golden Globe Awards. A sequel followed in 2013, and an animated television series premiered in 2017. The tagline was “Prepare to get served.”
The animation and the visual design
The animation holds up as a piece of design more than as spectacle. The food looks good. The tornado looks like a set piece. That gap is the whole film in miniature.
Where the movie actually stands
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is a good first film with a visible seam. Lord and Miller’s feature directorial debut arrived in 2009, loosely based on the children’s book by Judi and Ron Barrett, produced by Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation and released by Sony Pictures Releasing. The film centers on Flint’s machine and his attempt to stop it before it destroys the world. What it does well, it does with speed and confidence. What it does less well is trust its own characters in the final act.
The voice cast is the reason to watch it now. Hader and Faris carry the leads, Caan anchors the father, and the film surrounds them with performers who could have phoned it in and did not.
The script is the interesting part. Two firings, a re-hire, a third near-firing, and a studio note that produced the film’s best relationship. That is not a tidy origin story, and the film reflects it. The comedy is sharp and the story is patchy, and the two never fully reconcile. A sequel and a series followed, but the first film never solved the tension between its premise and its people.
What matters here is the anchoring relationship. Pascal was right that the film needed one, and the film is better for having it. The parts that drag are the parts where the machine takes over from the people. A film about a device that makes food fall from the sky should be about the people underneath it. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs knows that for about an hour. It forgets it when the spaghetti starts spinning.
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