At a cultural moment when everybody seems like an aspiring foodie, when diet and over-consumption are up for heated debate and when cable television glorifies the alchemy of the kitchen with shows from "Iron Chef" to "Top Chef," it feels perfectly right to have a family film about gigantic hot dogs dropping from the sky. Like a squishy, funny response to the grim, appetite-dampening films "Food, Inc." and "Fast Food Nation," the 3-D delight "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" imparts its important messages about greed, gluttony, waste and climate change while celebrating, not discouraging, the joy of eating.
It's responsible with a light and nimble touch, hitting its targets without a preachy note. If it's going to rain down pizza and ice cream, it says, it's best not to get too carried away. The movie shows how our ravenous appetites, be they gustatory or financial, can lead us to the brink of social — and physical and ecological — breakdown. And it hints at what can happen when humanity's blind pursuit of technological advancement goes unchecked, such as crazy weather patterns that have a dire impact on the planet.
 Courtesy photo: Sony Pictures
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It also shows that following your passions and grasping for originality has its rewards. Young, string-bean-lank Flint Lockwood (voiced with endearing elasticity by Bill Hader) is doing just that in his backyard laboratory, a teeming emporium of hand-made high-tech. The aspiring inventor lives in an island town that eats almost exclusively its sole cash crop, sardines.
Citizens are sick of sardines, so Flint invents an airborne contraption that can turn water into any food he commands. Up in the clouds, the machine morphs the molecular makeup of liquid into pizza, candy, sushi, bagels, pancakes — the menu is endless — and the food miraculously rains down upon the town for everyone's instant ingestion. (You'd think a storm of cheeseburgers would break windows and dent cars, but that comes later.)
"My invention can save the whole town!" Flint exclaims. But what about the whole world? The movie skips the possibilities of curing global hunger, a weird oversight that directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller perhaps thought would make things too heavy, too message-y.
Loosely based on Judi and Ron Barrett's popular 1982 picture book — the film hyper-inventively vamps on the original — "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" is massively entertaining and fun to look at. The computer animation is bulbous and voluptuous and silky like marshmallows. The smoothly integrated 3-D is never gratuitous, popping and protruding at all the right moments, keeping things frenetic but unusually lucid.
Joy resides in the glinting imagery. Bacon slices tumble down, a nacho cheese fountain spurts and gurgles, a jellybean rainbow arcs across the sky and children gambol over a landscape of scooped, multiflavored ice cream. (The menagerie of voice talent also charms: Mr. T, Andy Samberg and Neil Patrick Harris as Flint's kooky monkey assistant Steve.)
But drama lurks. Flint's stolid father (James Caan) struggles to accept his nerdy, unconventional son's wonky pursuits. The town's mayor (Bruce Campbell) exploits Flint's invention for his own vainglorious means. Flint and the local weather girl (Anna Faris) are falling in love. And when the machine malfunctions, spitting out grotesque super-sized food — meatballs as destructive as meteors — and generating catastrophic weather events — a furious spaghetti tornado — the entire world is in sudden peril. (Cue the lesson about human-induced climate change and bulging landfills.)
Playing God can be problematic, but chasing your dreams and proving doubters wrong is a noble cause. In this fleet fantasy, a delicious hymn to perserverance and individuality and the no-nos of gorging one's self and one's planet, it's all about not biting off more than you can chew.
