Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

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All photos courtesy of Sony Pictures Entertainment

Lamb chops, becoming heavy at times, with occasional ketchup…periods of peas and baked potatoes… That was the premise, at once mouthwatering and vaguely forbidding, behind Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the widely admired 1978 children’s picture book. When read before bedtime, it has caused more than one youngster to suddenly realize (I can personally vouch for this) how really, really hungry he is: how flat-out desperate for a bowl of cereal or a reheated plate of spaghetti.

Written by Judi Barrett, and illustrated by her then-husband Ron Barrett in a disarmingly sober pen-and-ink style that might have seemed more at home in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, Cloudy is a story within a story. A grandfather regales his young charges with the tale of a town called Chewandswallow, in which food—such as burgers with the works—falls from the sky like rain. It’s a situation that the townspeople consider just peachy until a season of nasty weather has them dodging giant olives and doughnuts and relocating to more welcoming, if less appetizing, climes.

Cloudy hit bookstores during the Carter years, at a time when the giddy indulgences of the so-called Me Decade were running headlong into environmental catastrophe at Love Canal, OPEC’s gas lines, the panicky plummet of Skylab and the inflationary malaise of the late ’70s. With that uncanny timing, the book seemed to carry a crucial social lesson about the hidden dangers of life in the Land of Plenty.

This month’s animated adaptation by Sony takes the story in a considerably lighter direction that should delight most parents and kids, even as it dismays fans of the original’s apocalyptic undercurrents. For one thing, the strange weather is now explained as the handiwork of a hapless if lovable young inventor, Flint Lockwood (voiced by SNL’s Bill Hader). He comes up with a machine that can somehow convert precipitation into any kind of food imaginable as a way to save his beleaguered town (now known as Swallow Falls) from an unpalatable diet made up almost entirely of sardines. There’s a love interest, too: a plucky TV news intern and would-be weather girl (Anna Faris), who has clearly landed the scoop of a lifetime. (Actually, that would be scoops, if you include all the ice cream.) Additional vocal talent includes Mr. T, Bruce Campbell and Neil Patrick Harris.

Written and directed by Chris Miller and Phil Lord, the team behind the underappreciated MTV animated series Clone High—another slyly winking take on science gone wrong—Cloudy has been reimagined as a shrewd comedy, a dead-on send-up of disaster flicks like Armageddon, Twister and The Day After Tomorrow. While some family films take aim at the heart, Cloudy shoots for the funny bone. And, of course, the stomach. Buttered popcorn? Make it a bucket.

Opens Sept 18. Find showtimes near you.

• Interview with Bill Hader
• Film articles
• Articles from this issue