Haven't I Seen This Somewhere Else?

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (three and a half stars total) didn't look good when I first saw the trailer. I wasn't familiar with the children's book it's based on. I couldn't see Bill Hader (Adventureland, Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian) as a leading man and I hadn't been impressed by Anna Faris in her leading roles (Smiley Face, The House Bunny). The character designs looked to be ripped off of the Muppets. I couldn't tell if it was about another child prodigy (Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Meet the Robinsons) or if it was another tired disaster spoof (Chicken Little, Horton Hears a Who!). Then the critics loved it and my coworkers who saw it loved it and my wife read the book in the bookstore and liked it. Today my wife got a free copy in the mail through her blog. She gets packages everyday but it's usually stuff I wouldn't buy on my own so I don't feel like we're saving any money. I won't go as far as saying that I would've bought Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, but it's definitely worth a rental. It turns out there's nothing else like it, not even the book on which it's based. At its core, it's the age-old story of a son trying to make his father proud, but it also has a romance that doesn't feel tacked on or cliché. The obese mayor and the machine with a mind of its own reminded me of WALL-E and the translation device for the dad reminded me of Up but my only real complaint would be all the neon colors and shading. This motion picture is more about the motion than the pictures anyway. Watch the main character bounce from object to object inside the spaghetti tornado (or in the Jell-O castle for that matter). My two-year-old son enjoyed naming the different kinds of food ("Bacon! Hot dogs! Pizza!") as they rained down from the sky. Last but not least, listen for the nerdy dialogue. I'm glad we own the movie because I think I missed some one-liners.

Thankfully Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs isn't one of them, but have you ever noticed that computer animated movies are released around the same time in thematic pairs?

1. Insects - Antz versus A Bug's Life (both 1998)
2. Underwater - Finding Nemo (2003) versus Shark Tale (2004)
3. Fairy tales - Shrek 2 (2004) versus Hoodwinked! (2005) and Happily N'Ever After (2006)
4. Man versus beast - Open Season versus Over the Hedge versus The Wild (all 2006)
5. Penguins - Happy Feet (2006) versus Surf's Up (2007)
6. Rodents - Flushed Away (2006) versus Ratatouille (2007) versus The Tale of Despereaux (2008)
7. Post-apocalyptic worlds - Battle for Terra (2007) versus Delgo (2008) or WALL-E (2008) versus Tim Burton's 9 (2009)
8. Rockets - Fly Me to the Moon versus Space Chimps (both 2008)
9. Secret agents - Bolt (2008) versus G-Force (2009)
10. Supervillains - Despicable Me versus Oobermind (both 2010)