Imagine.

Up in the sky, where once the Sun used to reside, now exist a dark mass of clouds that’s slowly billowing. Meteorologists say that this is going to be the storm of the century. Before you know it, huge slices of fishcake start raining from the sky! A colossal tau pok [square-shaped fried bean curds] is on the verge of crashing upon the Esplanade! And just as an encore, heavy drops of laksa [a popular spicy noodle soup from Peranakan culture] gravy descend and burn through the roof of your home.

Well, this would probably be an apt description for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, that is, with a Singaporean twist.

Inspired by Ron and Judi Barrett’s children’s book of the same title, this indeed is a movie you want to catch!
We first meet Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader), the town’s resident scientist. Since his youth, Flint has always had a dream to be recognised as one of the greats on par with Isaac Newton and Alexander Graham Bell. However, his inventions don’t always work out the way he intends for them to. With perpetual disasters round the corner of every invention, Flint is by far the most destructive citizen of his town, Swallow Falls.

The small city, whose main means of business is catching and canning sardines, faces a lack of food variety after a crash in their economy. The people are then left to eat sardines in various unimaginable ways – steamed, fried and even through a bottle.

While all these things are happening, Flint’s dad, Tim Lockwood (James Caan) is urging his son to give up his dreams to be a scientist and work in the family’s bait and tackle shop.

As always, Flint’s “intuitive” nature gets the worse of all situations. He creates a machine that would transform water into food. All he has to do is just key in descriptions for relevant food types and poof! The intended food is created. Unfortunately, as with any gadget that Flint creates, it never works as planned.

The machine is launched into the sky and it seems for a moment that all hope is lost for Flint and Swallow Falls. As dark clouds slowly envelop the town with roaring thunders in the distance, Flint sits by the harbour all lonesome and morose.

By now, you probably think that the whole show revolves around a loser whose attempt at saving the world has failed – yet again. The next most important character alongside Flint is weather girl, Sam Sparks (Anna Faris).

This aspiring weather reporter, who’s a “closet” meteorological expert, fails at her day job in a rather embarrassing way. In an expected turn of events, both individuals meet by the harbour and drown in each other’s sorrows.

As the story develops, Flint and Sam wait with little or no hope for a change, but almost in an instant, cheeseburgers start falling from the sky. The glimmer of hope starts to reignite in their eyes.

It’s one small cheeseburger for Swallow Falls and one giant leap for Flint Lockwood that happened because of the bizarre rain. After providing food for Swallow Falls, his career starts escalating and soon enough, Flint is the town hero.

From orange juice rain to ice cream covered roofs and pavements, Flint gives the town more variety than they’ve ever encountered since sardines. Everything was going well until the overly charismatic Mayor Shelbourne (Bruce Campbell) takes things into his own hands and orders a multitude of food. This causes the machine to malfunction, resulting in enormous portions of food raining down to destroy the town.

The local elementary school is covered with a giant pancake topped with honey and butter while the buildings are crushed by giant sushi. Everything gets out of hand – a tornado of meatball pasta starts storming through the town (a similar scene from the movie Twister), and giant meatballs are flung from the huge tornado, wrecking everything in its path.

Flint realises the menace that his creation has caused and decides to hide. His act of cowardice resolves a lack of hope for Swallow Falls. However, Flint’s dad reaffirms his son and encourages him not to hang up his lab coat but save the town.

Flint, together with a group of friends, goes up into the sky to shut down the machine manually. The town is once again safe and sound and the unlikely hero, Flint, and his heroine, Sam, get together and it’s all a happily ever after.

This animation film is indeed a joy to watch. With its quirky punch lines and fast paced action scenes, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is a movie for all age groups.

With this picture being the first Sony’s digital 3-D imaging software enabled film, it was simply different. Many who expect to see food flying in your faces may be terribly disappointed. The 3-D engineering does, however, add a literal depth to the film. Audience members can expect to visually discern the distance between objects and of course see 3 dimensional imaging of characters and objects.

This motion picture is definitely one for anyone! If you are looking to spend an afternoon to catch a movie and you don’t know what to decide on, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, is worth a shot.

Release Details:

Date: Oct 1
Duration: 90 min
Language: English
Rating: G
Genre: Animation
Director: Phil Lord & Christopher Miller (How I Met Your Mother)
Cast: Bill Hader, Anna Faris, James Caan