Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

Wise and respectful of its audience, "Cloudy" thus never stops the fun.

The sights are ingenious, impressively rendered in 3-D, and the sounds – including cheeky voice work by Mr. T, Neil Patrick Harris, and Benjamin Bratt – are a blast.

It’s a brisk, bright, winning effort, even though it already looks sadly out of touch with the times.

Eye-popping and mouth-watering in one, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs spins a 30-page children's book into a 90-minute all-you-can-laugh buffet.

It’s not especially filling, but it leaves a pleasant aftertaste.

The year’s 3-D deluge continues: Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is an amusingly loopy kids’ meal about a small-town inventor.

A dead-serious piece of activist filmmaking.

LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKWWWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't exactly hate this movie, I just find it highly overrated. I will say that the writing is clever and the heart works, not to mention the characters are funny, but with everything else, that's where the movie becomes mediocre. First, there's the animation. Sure, the backgrounds are nice and detail gives the food a nice polish, but the characters just look too abstract for a feature length movie. The character animation doesn't help that aspect, as it tries to look way too cartoon-like, as if their bones were rubber chickens. But then there's the connection to the original book. Out of all the movies I've seen based on a children's book, this has to be the one that stays true to the source material the least. I will give it that it does explain how it rains food in a creative way, but where in the original bedtime story did it include an inventor, a food hurricane or a town that lives off sardines? Again, it does have some good qualities, but it's still a below average movie.

Although it is clichéd and undoubtely overhyped, Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs is funny and offers a visual treat which is hard to resist. (Especially for kids)

Never a fan of this franchise. All characters are just so boring. The story is just so messy and dull. Only some good jokes land. I could give credit that they did the conflict and drama very well, but I thought it was a waste of time. The animation is sometimes blurry. Overall, this can be good, they choose to waste it.

It is hard to realize how truly weird this movie is. If the plot remains overly simple from beginning to the end the execution totally lacks to be desired. It all feels so often confusing, repetitive and drafty. Characters are as shallow and uninteresting as the relation they all build together. Many of them can easily be synthetized in one dialogue line to identify how simple and non-nuanced their goals and purpose are. The villain appear to be overly stereotyped witout any decent reason. The romance is poorly written, with the classic 'love at first sight' followed by all the awkwardness you can imagine. Hero's family ties are boring and incomplete as they all focus on Flint's aspirations and struggles in life. If 'Cloudy with Chance of Meatballs' could have been a deep satire of the omnipresence of food, its unavoidable waste and its terrible overconsumption, it eventually falls far from it as it constantly develops effort to remain in a bizarre and dumb category. It is like if the directors didn't even realize they were tackling some major and potentially interesting issues in our societies! I would say it becomes weirder and weirder as we come closer to the end, in a way that the ending scenes take an unexplainable taste of surrealism. 3D effects appear to be rather ugly from time to time. Music is as uninspired as generic. Humour almost always follows the main weirdo theme of the movie but sometimes manages to be surprisingly clever here and there. In the whole hometown we only focus on less than eight characters.