I'll have the steak, the chicken and, erm, the chicken fried steak.

Sony Pictures has a new output of animation following Open Season, Monster House and the absolute masterpiece Surf's Up, again grabbing as many insanely awesome voices in one film, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs announces the first worldwide 3-D release from the studio, Monster House was rather limited given it was before the 3-D boom.

I think before we start the film's talk, I want to focus on the cast.
Bill Hader, Anna Faris, James Caan, Andy Samberg, Bruce Campbell, Mr. T, Bobb'e J.. Thompson, Neil Patrick Harris, Lauren Graham, Will Forte & Neil Flynn.
I know, right, epic! Hader, Forte and Samberg being some real gems from modern SNL, also included in that genre are Poehler and Wiig, then Anna Faris who is, alongside Catherine O'Hara, one of the funniest females around right now. James Caan, well, needless to explain that, Mr. T is pure retro, Bruce Campbell is groovy, Bobb'e is hilarious even in dreck like Land Of The Lost, NPH is NPH, he's Awesome, Lauren Graham is fantastic and Neil Flynn, well, he's a genius.

And that as a voice cast is ridiculously sturdy, and it shows, as the acting is never out of whack in this film, even when zany and emotional mix together, with Hader really going a step up here for developing a character who retains eccentricity in the face of romantic and parental scenarios.

So, the plot is this weird odd kid, Flint Lockwood, constantly invents things, ratbirds, remote controlled televisions, in a small island in the middle of the Atlantic whose sole income is a Sardine fishing and canning industry, which goes out of business, leaving the island with no money and only sardines to eat in many ways.
One day Flint invents a machine that can transform the molecules in water into food items of any kind, but when testing found it needs lots of power. Meaning he has to go outside, to a transformer station. And of course things go wrong to satisfy a feature length plot, the machine gets too much juice and flies into the air, making it rain food items. Soon enough as the town becomes popular, thanks to a weather intern, Faris, reporting on the crazy situation, radiation from the clouds affect the machine, the food gets bigger and bigger, and as Mayor Campbell gets fatter and more selfish the whole town is put in peril of being destroyed by massive food crushing them.

In between action Flint forms a relationship with the weather intern and tries to impress his father, who has become more and more introverted after his wife's passing. You know, generic middle class problems that kids really understand and comprehend. Thankfully not told too often in a patronising way.

But the film is an animated comedy, leading to some really neat sequences, scaling a deep cavern of peanut brittle with a liquorice rope, an ice cream snowball fight that gets rather violent rather quickly, Gummi Bears attacking the wings of planes.

It's almost surreal in it's way, and that's what makes the film so good, when it wants to it is willing to maybe alienate the kids with some risque jokes or some old references, but always manages to add a monkey doing things or some slightly low brow stuff to let the kids laugh too, which is nice, but infuriating at the same time.

the writer/directors of the film have previous credits in How I Met Your Mother and Clone High, two real gems of TV, the former a consistently risque yet fantastically funny show, the latter a very close to the bone piss take on high school TV dramas. And it's good that even with a U rated film they can scale some slightly odd territory, and don't succumb to Dreamworks' horrible output of pop-culture quips and waste of time characters who add nothing but tedious one liners, even Mr. T's crazy athletic police officer has his own sub-plot, everyone gets time for development, and whilst it makes the film seem longer than it is, it means the writers genuinely care about what they are doing and want the audience to care too.

Lets face it, Pixar do it better and with less pandering or over exposed characters, but they are the pinnacle of animation studios, we can't expect the same output from anyone else, but when it's not entirely awful, it's rather nice to watch, as is the case with Cloudy.
7/10