Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs Blu-ray
Take a town that is suffering the loss of a major industry and an inventor whose inventions never really turned out well and you have the makings of a great film.
Film making 18/25
Video 22/25
Audio 22/25
Bonus Features 16/25
Total 78/100
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs starts out as a great film and then goes downhill some with the films take on the main disaster that turns out to be a maniacal machine. Flint Lockwood is a small time inventor whose inventions never really seem to take off and when the towns’ sardine industry shuts down Flint comes to the rescue.
Flint is voiced by Bill Hader with Anna Faris as the come to town to see the unveiling of the new sardine amusement park weather girl Sam Sparks. Some other notable actors lending their voice talents are James Caan, Mr. T, Bruce Campbell, Neil Patrick Harris and Al Roker.
When Flint’s previous inventions don’t take off like he hoped they would he does come to the rescue of the town but his invention gets out of hand. I thought spray on shoes was pretty good but Flint could not figure out how to get them off and the language translator does work, his monkey does talk through it.
Flint makes a machine that creates food from water but it doesn’t have quite enough power to make it work right so he needs to boost the input. He uses the mayor’s unveiling of a sardine amusement park to sneak to the power transfer station to power his gadget.
The machine at first streaks to the clouds when Flint first connects it to the power so Flint and everyone else thinks his latest invention is another failure. When the multicolored clouds move in and start to rain cheeseburgers everyone cheers at Flint’s first invention to actually work well.
Flint gets orders from people to deliver food like a special birthday treat for the town cop’s son and Flint delivers ice cream to the whole town. Flint continues to fill orders for people but the machine does have its limits and Flint makes sure he stays within those limits.
Flint is not sure what will happen when he does take the machine over the top and has even built a gauge to measure this, just how do you know when enough is enough on a meter? The mayor pushes the machine beyond its limits when his gluttony overtakes his common sense and he orders too much food, as well as eats too much.
When the mayor orders too much food the machine overloads and becomes a maniacal out of control monster that starts to send food of ever increasing size to plummet down on the town. The super sized food starts to destroy the town so Flint and Sam Sparks rush to the cloud to stop the machine and save the town.
Flint and Sam with help from Sam’s cameraman and the towns childhood advertising star Baby Brent save the day and destroy the machine that started to grow into a monster. I think this was the only part of the film that really started to take on a life of its own and the reason for my not liking the storyline the more it progressed.
Once the machine started a life of its own and started to animate food to attack Flint and friends as they worked to save the day the film started to get a bit too goofy. The story was great at the beginning and was very enjoyable but somewhere in the middle things took a decided odd turn and you could feel the change with the food coming to life.
Other than this it was a great movie and well worth watching, enjoyable with some really great scenes and well done voice acting. The movie had plenty of warmth and heart from the town cops request for a special treat for his son’s birthday to the romance sparking between Flint and Sam.
The video and audio are both great with some fantastic high definition video and very well done audio that both add a lot to this entertaining film. The video as usual from computer animation is great with bright vibrant colors and really well done depth.
I was very impressed with the animation and how you could actually see and almost feel the depth and dimension to the film, characters and backgrounds. The animators did a great job as showcased in one of the bonus features with a building being destroyed by an oversized hamburger.
Throughout the film some great scenes continue one after the other and the visuals really are worth watching the film almost by themselves. The audio is also well done starting with some great voice acting where the actors really got along well and had a lot of fun at their work.
The audio comes across clear and with good surround sound with a bit better than expected surround effect for both music and special effects. The effects are a bit of a surprise but music in general was nice to have such a clear and positive presence in the full surround during the film.
The audio as well as video is great which brings us to a pretty decent bonus content including the usual commentary deleted scenes and several making of features. Miranda Cosgrove also does a fun sing along and separate music video for the bonus content and you have several making of features.
Overall the bonus content is decent but only just above average as you see some of the films behind the scene stuff like animators and voice actors but not much more. The extended scenes and some of the commentary are not very interesting but some of the making of feature does talk about taking the film from the original book which is fun.
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is a fun film and well worth the cost of admission for a theme park thrill ride in a world of food from the clouds. Tacky I know but your kids will not want to miss this chance of a film from the hit book and adults will like the subtle humor that is riddled throughout the film.