Book vs. Movie: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
By Russ Bickerstaff
September 22, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie.
Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs
In 1978, husband and wife team Judi and Ron Barrett wrote a children's picture book entitled Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, an interesting story involving edible meteorological phenomena, natural disaster and recovery. The book was a great success and the couple subsequently worked together on other, lesser-known children's books like Animals Should Definitely Not Wear Clothing, Animals Should Definitely Not Act Like People and, most recently, a lesser-known sequel to Meatballs entitled Pickles to Pittsburgh. Both had done extensive solo work: Ron had worked as an illustrator for the National Lampoon and as art director for ad agencies Young & Rubicam and Carl Ally. Judi has written dozens of children's books in addition to her work with Ron. In 2006, the fledgling Sony Pictures Animation studio announced that it would begin working on a CGI animated feature film treatment of the beloved children's book. How does a modern animated feature compare with a 30-year-old children's picture book?
The Book
At 32 pages, the book is an exceedingly quick read. I say this having not had the benefit of having been introduced to the book at a time when I would've fit into its target demographic. The book has scores of adult fans who have fond memories of having the book read to them as children. The fact that the book has had that kind of longevity speaks to its overwhelming popularity. It's hard to quantify the book's popularity, but a good indicator of this is the fact that in its first ten years, the book had already gone through some 20 printings. This is a very, very popular book.
The story is told from the perspective of two children (one boy and one girl) who are sitting down to a breakfast of pancakes being prepared by their grandfather. A dog chases a cat, disturbing the grandfather, who accidentally tosses a pancake on the head of the boy. This prompts the grandfather to tell them a bedtime story later on that evening about a mythical town of Chewandswallow - a place blessed with edible weather.
The book proceeds to outline in remarkable and remarkably clever detail the plight of a town where weather came three times a day in the form of food that would drop from the sky. People would check the weather report like a menu. There were restaurants without ceilings. The sun would set as a giant Jell-O mold. This is precisely the type of thing that has no difficulty capturing the imagination of its target audience, but the story doesn't end there. Of course, it just wouldn't be a story without conflict and the book begins to detail problems with the edible weather. A torrential storm of spaghetti brings traffic to a standstill. The weather would come up with inedible combinations like brussel sprouts with peanut butter and mayo. There were 15-inch drifts of cream cheese and jelly sandwiches. There were salt and pepper tornadoes. It got to be too much. So the people of Chewandswallow left town to gradually become acquainted with the idea of buying food at the supermarket. The brother and sister fall asleep and awaken the following morning to a heavy snowfall. They're out sledding the next day and the sun over a snow hill looks distinctly like a pat of butter on a giant mound of mashed potatoes.
The illustrations are heavily rendered with hatching and cross-hatching, lovingly embellishing the story with a staggering level of detail. The artwork may look distinctly ‘70's in style and execution, but when the book travels to the Grandfather's story, the styles, fashions and architecture are pretty firmly panted in the late ‘50s/early ‘60s. The really clever thing here are the food references packed into the corners of Chewandswallow illustrations. The Rialto Cinema is playing Duck Soup and Breakfast at Tiffany's. The town's daily paper is called The Digest. A moving company van is adorned with the company name "Bowel Movers." The level of detail is remarkable. Like any good picture book, there's always something more that a reader might not have noticed that can be seen on subsequent readings.
This is kind of a carefully composed look into the life of a fantasy - from inspiration to realization, and then recognition of the negative end of things and finally acceptance of the way things really are and the understanding of the importance of that fantasy in reality. It's all very cleverly laid out. It's not difficult to see why it has had such long-lasting appeal. The only real problem here is the book's lack of volume. Ideas quickly come into view and are just as quickly discarded in the rush of the plot. This does have the effect of engaging the imagination, but there's a bit of a wistful desire to see more - and that's just a bit less than satisfying.
The Movie
The prospect of turning a very brief picture book into an 81-minute animated film poses an interesting challenge to the filmmaker. In constructing a plot around the brilliantly simple premise, one could go in a variety of different directions. Filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller (who also wrote the short-lived animated show Clone High) decided to go a pretty conventional route with the plot. Rather than treating it as a largely amorphous story designed to capture the imaginations of the children who will be going to see it, Lord and Miller had opted for a more traditional feel-good animated kids film plot that may be endearing and somewhat satisfying, but lacks much of the sense of wonder that makes the book so appealing in the first place.
Lord and Miller have dropped the grandfather/grandchildren characters in favor of a loveably wacky young inventor named Flint Lockwood (Bill Hader.) Flint deals with the usual sorts of problems that go along with being a Hollywood scientist, including public ridicule, a solitary life and generally being socially inept. The town he grows up in is an evidently American town on an island in the middle of what appears to be the Atlantic ocean. This is kind of a strange alternative to placing the town in a place east of a great mountain range (the Midwest?). The island town of Swallow Falls is constantly at odds with Lockwood, as it is often the victim of his bizarre inventions. Things turn around as he invents a device that can turn water into food. An accident causes the machine to get launched into a geosynchronous orbit over the town, which is promptly renamed Chewandswallow.
Giving the edible precipitation an origin robs the plot of its wildly whimsical sense of fantasy. It discards this in favor of a thoroughly likeable character who is struggling to make something of himself. The plot pretty much plays out how one might expect, with a focus on themes of excess and environmental collapse that really should be included in more children's fare if society is ever going to pull out of its current global climate crisis.
As Lockwood deals with suddenly immense popularity and finally being able to do something for people he has been plaguing all these years, he begins to fall in love with a meteorologist for a weather channel voiced by Anna Farris. The love between Lockwood and Sam Sparks is fun, particularly as it follows two quirky characters on their journey through a man-made environmental disaster. Sparks is an interesting character for a kids' movie. She's strikingly intelligent, but afraid to show it for fear of not being accepted. Like so many people, she's far more intelligent than the job she's required to do and she must constantly feign vacuous stupidity in order to get ahead. It's a very clever dynamic to show kids. Anti-intellectualism is another one of those societal problems that we really need to be exposing kids to at a very early age so that they can work through it and make future generations a lot more adaptive. Like the whole environmental aspect that's been added to the film's plot, the additional material loses some of the minimalist simplicity found in the book.
The film is truest to the book when it crams the screen with details. On one level, the film is an endless parade of visual jokes that are aimed specifically at the adults who may be forced to see the film over and over again on home video. From text crawls to ads to posters, there's really A LOT in here. The crowd shots of Times Square are dizzying. There's just so much detail . . . and specific visuals from the book make it into the film, like a restaurant with no roof and my personal favorite: a baseball game that has to be canceled due to apple pie. The fast-paced visuals of the film keep the morals from ever seeming too heavy-handed. This film has been put together by exceedingly competent hands.
The Verdict
Contrary to what's been said elsewhere, statements made about the original book with regards to gluttony, excess and its impact on the environment were largely implied by readers. The book doesn't explicitly show any gluttony. In it, we see a town that isn't necessarily overeating so much as it is enjoying the rather unique weather. Any moral the original book may have had would've probably had more to do with being prepared for things to change, being adaptive and above all, not relying too much on the outside world because everything can change. The movie, by contrast is making a very specific statement about gluttony and excess. It's nice to see it addressed again (we'd seen something similar to this last year in WALL-E, which actually handled the theme much more brilliantly,) but it does rob the book of its more simplistic, much more primal exploration of the nature of fantasy.