may feel for the overindulged little birthday boy who falls into a food coma.

Punctuated with killer meatballs, a human roasted chicken and other missiles rich in bad cholesterol, the action is spiced with giddy romantic comedy when our young dweeb attempts to win the heart of a smart but dumbed-down young weathergirl (the sublime Anna Faris) by building her a giant house out of Jell-O.īy the end of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, we in the U.S. Eventually, they must reverse the caloric deluge, in segments that play like a fond 3-D salute to Hammer Horror, mediated by Wallace and Gromit. If this weren't enough of an animator's dream, Flint and the usual array of self-redeeming outcasts and losers embark on an odyssey through the atmosphere's layers. Fountains in the new and improved Swallow Falls overflow with mac and cheese a cop's son gets an ice cream city for his birthday and, in a delicious dig at the perfidy of politicians, the pompadoured mayor (Bruce Campbell), thrilled that his benighted town is finally on the map, gets fatter and fatter until he's a rolling tub of lard. When Flint's experiment runs amok, his gray and depressed coastal town, which subsists miserably on leftover sardines from its defunct processing plant, undergoes a dramatic climate change that turns it into a candy-colored sugar high - and then, more ominously, into a consumer-friendly tourist spot hilariously pounded from on high with cheeseburgers, giant pizzas and fried eggs. Loosely based on a book by Judi Barrett - both directors say they loved it as kids - and stuffed with A-list voiceover, this Sony Pictures production is animated with love, care and ample mischief by, as the opening credits announce, 'a lot of people.' It goes without saying that Flint Lockwood (voiced by Saturday Night Live regular Bill Hader), the socially maladroit young amateur scientist who sets off dominoes of culinary trouble before emerging as the film's hero, is a sharp-angled geek with enormous glasses whose bedroom wall carries a poster of his hero Nikola Tesla, inventor of the alternating current. Grinning amiably and insisting that they were 15 years old (both are in their early 30s), the pair summed up their film as 'a superexpensive student movie.' Clutching popcorn and soda, one of this team of Dartmouth-educated animators was skinny and owlish with enormous glasses the other oblivious to the shirttails floating free of his baggy jeans. Warming up an audience for a recent screening of their beguiling new movie, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, writer-directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord offered living proof of why most children's pictures today end up as the revenge of the nerds. of the sort you'd expect to hear if you saw a meatball fall from the sky

Cloudy and a chance of meatballs book