4/5
(GP) US. Anna Faris, Bill Hader, Bruce Campbell
While it may not scale the artistic heights of a Finding Nemo or Wall-E, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is still one of the most satisfying non-Pixar CG animated movies to date. On a remote island principality in the mid-Atlantic, the populace have been living on sardines since the canned-fish market dried up. So plucky young scientist Flint Lockwood, inventor of overactive hair-unbalder and spray-on shoes (which you can never remove), commits himself to solving the problem, with a machine that turns water into food, creating anything from pizza to ice cream. It’s a success, until the machine goes berserk and it starts to rain cheeseburgers.

The film’s greatest pleasure is its bizarre sense of humour. Fusing snappy one-liners with a kid-friendly seam of slapstick incorporating everything from talking monkeys to homicidal Gummi Bears, the script provokes comparison with comedy from The Mighty Boosh to The Marx Brothers.