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Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG (some brief mild language) Genre: Animated, Comedy, Family Theater release: September 18, 2009 by Columbia Pictures Directed by: Columbia Pictures Runtime: 1 hour 30 minutes Cast: Bill Hader (Flint Lockwood), Anna Faris (Sam Sparks), James Caan (Tim Lockwood), Andy Samberg ("Baby" Brent), Bruce Campbell (Mayor Shelbourne), Mr. T (Earl Devereaux) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

What's the last family film you can think of that name-checked Nikola Tesla and Alexander Graham Bell? When in movie history has the girl ever revealed her true self and become more attractive to the hero by putting on spectacles and pulling back her hair?

And, let's face it, when's the last time any of us has seen a former child star wearing a giant roasted chicken battling comestible defense mechanisms while a peanut-allergic weather girl lowers the hero via licorice rappelling rope into a shaft of razor-sharp peanut brittle where the slightest scratch could prove deadly to her? (If that seems convoluted and complicated, you're tracking just fine!)

Flint Lockwood, voiced by Bill Hader

In these and so many other ways, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs takes the road less traveled. Supremely silly yet peppered with unexpected sophistication and subversive wit, Sony Pictures Animation's latest—more inspired by than based on the popular storybook by Judi and Ron Barrett—works harder and flies higher than you'd think, following in the footsteps of the studio's previous Monster House and Surf's Up. (So, yes, a lot better than Open Season. Nuff said.)

Which is not to say that Cloudy, from first-time feature directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, doesn't hit some overly familiar notes, too. Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader), a young science enthusiast, just wants to invent something great and prove himself to the skeptical citizens of Swallow Falls, but his inventions never turn out quite as expected (compare A Bug's Life, Jimmy Neutron, Robots, Meet the Robinsons). No one understands or believes in him, including, alas, his uncomprehending, disapproving father (compare Ratatouille, Happy Feet, The Tale of Despereaux, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascar 2, etc., etc.).

Sam Sparks, voiced by Ana Faris

What's surprising, though, is how much conviction Cloudy brings to its hero's science-nerd milieu, from his childhood posters of Tesla, Bell, Newton, and Einstein (the tongue-sticking-out shot, natch) to repeated close-ups of Flint hunched over a computer keyboard, eyes focused like laser beams as his flying fingers pound out computer code.

Then there's the weather-channel intern, Sam Sparks (Anna Faris), who has the requisite cute'n'perky excitement network bosses look for in a stand-in anchorbabe, but actually turns out to have a serious interest in meteorology and science that she's learned to hide. As silly as the tech is, Cloudy could be the first film of its ilk in years that could actually inspire young viewers, including girls, to think more about science.

As for Flint's lumbering, taciturn father Tim (James Caan), while he's never quite as humanized as he could have been, the third-act sequence in which he goes to bat for his son in a pinch (I know, the elder Lockwood would have used a fishing metaphor, but none of us would have understood it, including Flint) is both heartwarming and hilarious—particularly for anyone who's ever tried to talk a technically challenged parent or relative over the phone through the mysteries of e-mail, as well as anyone, probably, who has ever been that technically challenged parent.

Tim Lockwood, voiced by James Caan

It counts for something, too, that the old man's concerns about his son's latest invention—or rather how it's being used—are more or less vindicated. As is so often the case in science, the Flint Lockwood Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator—FLDSMDFR for short, a mouthful of an acronym that becomes a running gag—is part inspiration, part accident. The inspiration part is Flint's idea to use microwaves to mutate water molecules (go with it) into any-kind-of-food molecules. The accident part happens when Flint surreptitiously hooks up the FLDSMDFR to the local power plant, inadvertently rocketing it into the stratosphere, where, as it happens, there are plenty of water molecules.

For Sam Sparks, who's in Swallow Falls for a weather-channel puff piece, the resulting meteorological phenomena—as evidenced by the film's title—are the opportunity of a lifetime. And when Flint discovers Sam's science smarts, sparks fly—or, if not fly, at least bounce around on Jell-O.

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