Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs | Film review

# Animation in film

A veritable buffet of the bland and the bizarre, the sweet and the sour, and all tastes are catered for along the way, says Xan Brooks

Phil Lord's exuberant cartoon caper proves that 3D animation is a movable feast and not the preserve of Disney-Pixar alone. Based on a 1978 kids book (which presumably explains its very 70s line in cuisine), this amounts to a sly parable of unfettered consumption in which a plucky young inventor (Bill Hader) lavishes his hometown with meatball hailstorms and spaghetti cyclones. One moment our hero is mooning over a winsome weathergirl (Anna Farris); the next he's tussling with a gang of gigantic rotisserie chickens that lash at him with fleshy wings and bare-bone legs. The film itself is a veritable buffet of the bland and the bizarre, the sweet and the sour, and all tastes are catered for along the way.

Contributor

Xan Brooks

The GuardianTramp

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