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Review of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (Mark Mothersbaugh)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

Buy it... if ten minutes of majestic orchestral and choral highlights for this animated fantasy film are enough to float a highly frenetic and often challenging score that accomplishes its task with ease.

Avoid it... if your lack of interest in shifty parody scores with inconsistent personalities consistently limits your appreciation of even their occasional solitary highlights.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs: (Mark Mothersbaugh) The original story of "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" debuted in 1978 and has always seemed like the ultimate fantasy book for children in third world nations struck by famine. For the 2009 animated film adaptation from Sony, several major liberties are taken with the tale to expand it out to feature length for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, aiming to parody the rich genre (monetarily, not necessarily in terms of artistic quality) of modern disaster epics. On an island in the Atlantic known for its production of sardines, the economy collapses when global demand for the food suddenly diminishes. A nerdy, ingenious inventor of several failed projects concocts a machine that rearranges water particles to turn them into food, and in an accident during its momentous initial power-up, it launches like a rocket up into the sky and gets lodged somewhere in the stratosphere. It initially rains down food via instructions, turning the island into not only a new tourist attraction but also a haven for gluttons. The device eventually starts acting maliciously, sending out violent storms of food that wipe out the island and knock down famous landmarks all over the world. Other inventions of the lead protagonist are used to fly up to the machine and get the better of it, leaving room for a sequel movie that was rumored very quickly to be in the planning stages. A substantially positive critical response and awards recognition, coupled with immense box office returns (over $240 million worldwide), fueled this sequel talk, overcoming widely negative feedback about the movie's use of 3D in its second half. Providing the music for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs is parody and comedy veteran Mark Mothersbaugh, who testifies about how much he enjoyed working on this film and whose prior work is best represented by Rugrats and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Like Theodore Shapiro and Christopher Lennertz, Mothersbaugh is among the composers of the 2000's who toil with such challenging assignments in the same way that John Debney and David Newman made their careers in the 1990's. As in many of these cases, it's difficult to get a true sense of a composer's personal writing style when he produces so much music intentionally meant to sound like that of others. To define Mothersbaugh's musical voice is a challenge because of that parody effect, and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs does little to clarify the picture. At the most, this score is a capable and engaging genre entry, and at the worst, it is a capable and engaging genre entry. In general, you know what you're going to get.

If you recognize the limitations of parody scores like this one ahead of time, you can marginalize its sometimes frustrating effect when heard outside of context. Cue times are short, the music shifts between genres wildly, instrumental colors change from minute to minute, and the level of frantic movement is often mindboggling. The key to enjoying such scores resides in the composer's ability to draw it all together with very tightly cohesive themes and instrumentation that is unique to situations without being distracting. Unfortunately, Mothersbaugh doesn't quite succeed in this regard as well as Lennertz has done during the same period. While Mothersbaugh does write several interesting themes for Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, including a heroic anthem for the picture as a whole and a sensitive piano-led theme for the relationship between the inventor and his father, none of them is developed frequently and clearly enunciated enough to really hold the score together over the course of an hour. The instrumentation includes everything you could imagine for the occasion, featuring a standard orchestra and a variety of synthetic samples in various rhythmic and stinger applications. The highlight of the percussive usage is Mothersbaugh's employment of a variety of medium-range metallic clanging elements in "Failure Again" and "The Food Storm," among others, to perhaps represent the sound of silverware in use at a large dinner table. The orchestra is handled pretty well, though a very dry mix diminishes the score's reach into the fantasy realm at times. A handful of cues for awe-inspiring situations is afforded choral accompaniment, not surprisingly yielding some of the score's best moments. The electronics are clearly the greatest detriment of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, absolutely ruining several cues with their harsh tone and forceful placement in the mix. From electronic zapping effects to retro-technology sounds applied ten years prior by Debney, the sampled noises in this score are extremely distracting. A cue like "Powering Up" makes Debney's The Tuxedo seem like an exercise in good taste. As with any parody score, there are individual highlights, and some of the militaristic cues late in the film (as the mission to the machine in the sky is undertaken) are quite palatable. These scenes are highlighted by "Sentient Chickens" and "Flint Returns," both outstanding capitulations of orchestral and choral majesty. The best of the entire score is clearly "Meatier Shower," however, with that ensemble glory matched by elegant piano performances. On the whole, ten minutes of compilation-worthy material may not be worth the entire "CD on demand" and download product, one bracketed by unfortunate song performances. Save "Meatier Shower" for desert and politely pick away at the rest.  ***

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 65:38

• 1. Raining Sunshine - performed by Miranda Cosgrove (3:44) • 2. Swallow Falls (0:47) • 3. Introducing Flint (4:16) • 4. The Latest Invention (1:23) • 5. The Mayor/Earl Warns Flint (1:17) • 6. Sam's Big Break (0:50) • 7. Powering Up (1:05) • 8. Failure Again (1:54) • 9. Meatier Shower (3:10) • 10. A Father's Love (1:19) • 11. Ice Cream Wonderland (1:22) • 12. Snowball! (1:15) • 13. The Mayor's Big Plan (1:16) • 14. Activation and the Jello Dome (1:39) • 15. Sam and Flint Bond (2:00) • 16. Doubting Dad/Mutations (2:57) • 17. The Spaghetti Twister (3:08) • 18. Aftermath (2:26) • 19. Flint's Determination (2:44) • 20. The Food Storm (2:08) • 21. The Mission Begins (2:36) • 22. Outside the Meatball (1:57) • 23. Inside the Meatball (1:39) • 24. Earl Takes Charge (2:00) • 25. Sentient Chickens (2:42) • 26. Worldwide Chaos (0:57) • 27. Anaphylactic Love (1:41) • 28. Attack of the Gummy Bears (1:40) • 29. Here's the Cheese (1:25) • 30. The Heart of the Meatball (1:17) • 31. Spray-On Triumph (1:55) • 32. Flint Returns (3:31) • 33. Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows - performed by Lesley Gore (1:37)

NOTES & QUOTES:

The insert includes a note from the composer about the score and film. As in many of Amazon.com's "CDr on demand" products, the packaging smells incredibly foul when new.

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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs are Copyright © 2009, Colpix Music and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 3/23/11 (and not updated significantly since).