Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
The Book
The book Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is an American children's book written by Judi Barrett and illustrated by Ron Barrett. It was first published in 1978, though recently, a poll in 2007 voted this book "Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children" by the National Education Association. Even in this last year, 2012, it was voted one of the "Top 100 Picture Books of All Time" by School Library Journal.
So what exactly is all the rage about this book? Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is a picture book that begins with a family gathered for breakfast on a Saturday morning, when suddenly Grandpa by accidentally throws a pancake and it lands on Henry's head. From here we don't know what happens throughout the day, we just jump right to bedtime. This is when the young girl narrating begins to tell us that this night, Grandpa told them the best bedtime story he's ever told.
He told of this mysterious tiny town far, far away called the town of Chewandswallow. It sounded like any other town, except for the fact that there were no food stores in the town. Why? Their food came from the weather, it came three times a day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It would rain things like soup and juice, snow mashed potatoes and peas, and storms of hamburgers would blow into town. The weather reports on television told of what meals were going to be coming the next day. The book describes many days of normal, rather delicious, meals.
For some unexplained reason the meals coming from the sky become absolutely terrible, the weather was sending food that nobody wanted to eat, like overcooked broccoli and brussel sprouts served with mayonnaise and peanut butter. The food also started getting larger, to the point where it was extremely dangerous and almost deadly for the citizens of Chewandswallow. They were forced to take giant slices of stale bread and sail to the nearest safe haven. They settled into a new town on the coast of a new place and built houses out of the stale bread slices. The people didn't think the new town was all that different, except for the fact that their food was sold in food stores. It was so interesting that food was sold prepackaged and uncooked. They struggle to learn to survive in a world where the sky doesn't bring them food.
The children woke up that morning to fresh snow on the hill. They went sledding and they said they could've swore they saw a pad of butter on top of the hill and had the aroma of mashed potatoes surrounding them.
There is a sequel to this book titled Pickles to Pittsburgh where the same children from this book receive a postcard from their grandpa who claims to be visiting the ruins of the once fabled town of Chewandswallow. Once again the children go to sleep and then they dream of going there with their grandpa and helping him as they rebuild the destroyed town. They give food to the poverty-stricken and provide shelter for those who don't have homes. This book has a much meaningful message where as Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is more of an enjoyable fantasy land that children could dream of themselves. Other than that, there isn't much more meaning to it.
The most famous image would have to be the school getting covered by a giant pancake, forcing the school to shut down. In the book, it was a sad occasion, but in the film humor is brought upon the situation by the children rejoicing with, "No School!!"
The tourists of the town escape as the disaster is happening on sandwich boats, also mirroring the book. After a food avalanche, Flint finally kills the machine by using all of his past failed inventions. He ends up saving the town and gaining his father's forever sought approval.
The film has much more depth of character and plot than the original story and I believe that's what the director had to do in order to make the adaptation a success. The story of the underdog is apparent in Flint's tale. He becomes the hero through a coming of age, self discovery. This definitely created appeal for audiences of all ages, instead of just telling a story about imaginary people living in an imaginary town.
The children woke up that morning to fresh snow on the hill. They went sledding and they said they could've swore they saw a pad of butter on top of the hill and had the aroma of mashed potatoes surrounding them.
There is a sequel to this book titled Pickles to Pittsburgh where the same children from this book receive a postcard from their grandpa who claims to be visiting the ruins of the once fabled town of Chewandswallow. Once again the children go to sleep and then they dream of going there with their grandpa and helping him as they rebuild the destroyed town. They give food to the poverty-stricken and provide shelter for those who don't have homes. This book has a much meaningful message where as Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is more of an enjoyable fantasy land that children could dream of themselves. Other than that, there isn't much more meaning to it.
The Hollywood Film
A major trend in Hollywood in recent years has been taking children's stories and turning them into computer animated films in order to still hold the child-like appeal, while still trying to maintain humor for the crowd who originally knew the story from the book.
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs the movie, has to be the loosest adaptation of a book turned movie I've seen in a while. If I hadn't gone back and read the book, I'd only have reason to believe the title was the only thing these two mediums had in common.
Cloudy the movie is computer animated family comedy produced by Sony Pictures and released in 2009. The plot is based around and entirely different set of original characters, the main character being Flint Lockwood, an aspiring, but frequently failing inventor. He was misunderstood by his father growing up, only having his mother believe in in him, but she died when he was still at a young age. Flint lives in the town of Swallow Falls on an island. The town's once thriving sardine market crashed and forced the town's citizens to only eat sardines for every single meal.
Miraculously one day Flint actually invents a machine that turns water into any food you want. Unfortunately his invention absorbs a ton of the town's electricity and goes shooting up into the sky and gets caught in the stratosphere. People started discovering one day that it was raining cheeseburgers from the sky. Flint created a remote device that could reach the machine to control it from the sky. The mayor is completely enthused by the invention and renames the town Chewandswallow, like in the book, and starts advertising the town as a tourist attraction. The mayor demands more and more quantities of food to keep the interest of visitors and Flint starts to realize the amount of food raining down is getting a little out of control.
The mayor becomes morbidly obese and Flint's father still isn't showing approval of his son. Everything is building up for disaster; the people are becoming greedy and gluttonous and the machine has been showing signs of acting up. Suddenly, out of nowhere a spaghetti tornado terrorizes the town. Flint runs to his lab to find the Mayor punching in numerous dinner orders, sending the invention into a food frenzy, making it completely malfunction. A massive food storm threatens the town and starts terrorizing the people with massive portions of all kinds of food. This is where we see mirrored images taken from the book and put in the film, the only true relatable images from the book.
The most famous image would have to be the school getting covered by a giant pancake, forcing the school to shut down. In the book, it was a sad occasion, but in the film humor is brought upon the situation by the children rejoicing with, "No School!!"
The tourists of the town escape as the disaster is happening on sandwich boats, also mirroring the book. After a food avalanche, Flint finally kills the machine by using all of his past failed inventions. He ends up saving the town and gaining his father's forever sought approval.
The film has much more depth of character and plot than the original story and I believe that's what the director had to do in order to make the adaptation a success. The story of the underdog is apparent in Flint's tale. He becomes the hero through a coming of age, self discovery. This definitely created appeal for audiences of all ages, instead of just telling a story about imaginary people living in an imaginary town.
The Video Game
From the animated movie, the series had nowhere else to go but developing the video game. It was almost too convenient. The game makers basically has all the graphics they needed from the animated movie itself.
This adaptation obviously relates more to the film than the book. The game allows the player control Flint Lockwood, the film's hero as he must save his town and the world from the rain of food, fighting highly mutated food enemies, and using his gadgets to help him on the way. You're given 6 different gadgets used to help him proceed through Swallow Falls (Chewandswallow) to battle mutated foods. This game almost exactly follows the same exact plot of the movie as Flint battles his way through six different levels in search or destroying his malfunctioning invention.
The game was released at the same time as the movie, definitely as a marketing device. I feel like the plots of the film and game are almost too similar, in the fact that the game producers may have been hoping people would buy the game before viewing the movie. There isn't anything too exceedingly different from the movie in the plot of this game and its controls.
A simple childhood picture book from 1978 was resurrected in 2009 in the form of cinema to become a completely different story that resonates with a completely different audience but still allows a gap of generations to be bridged in the adaptation of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.
Bibliography:
Book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudy_with_a_Chance_of_Meatballs
Film: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudy_with_a_Chance_of_Meatballs_(film)
Video game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudy_with_a_Chance_of_Meatballs_(video_game)
