As a tadpole I was at a loss to understand why so many of my peers gained satisfaction from playing with their food. There was always someone who delighted in sticking a piece of wham bar to the wall or mashing their ice cream so those tantalising glaciered domes were turned into putrid sludge. Even today, watching a child eviscerating their nosh makes me nauseous but it obviously strikes a cord with some of our young and so here’s an animation that simultaneously taps into that childhood predilection for playful consumption while reminding both kids and adults that we’ve all got to eat responsibly and keep waste to a minimum. That’s having your cake and eating it you say? Well I say, do you mind – I’LL do the food metaphors thank you very much.

Just as Disney did before them, Pixar – a licence to print money now owned by the house of mouse, has been enormously successful in setting the de facto standard for animated comedies. With the likes of Toy Story, The Incredibles and so on, there was always the danger the winning formula, namely an adherence to stories that were self-consciously quirky, designed for parent and child alike and placing emphasis on the familial virtue which both paterfamilias and sprogs find so reassuring, might blandify the children’s film and consign less confected offerings to the fringes. Thanks to some sharp writing and plenty of nervous energy, Sony’s Cloudy with a chance of Meat Balls just about manages to stick its head above the parapet and escape being an also ran, but an uneven tone means it isn’t as assured as its Pixar and DreamWorks peers.

Based on a 1978 children’s book by Judi Barrett, the story hangs on socially awkward teen inventor Flint Lockwood, gifted lines like “we just need 17,000 more gigajules!” who turns around the fortunes of his island community. Hitherto reliant on sardine exports for its livelihood, his invention of a machine that inseminates clouds with food producing mutagens, allows the communities’ favourite munch to rain down upon a greedy populous.

WARNING: Paragraph contains added food metaphors. Writers and Directors Christopher Miller and Phil Lord make a solid fist of mixing the movie’s core ingredients. The animation is a thick pattie of Nickelodeon style character animation kneaded into some carefully drawn and significantly more expressive backgrounds. If the two elements don’t balance so well, possibly on account of separate sets of animators being responsible for each, it is, just occasionally, a feast for the eyes – warm colours and a couple of grandiose set pieces at the tail end wringing the most out of the third dimension. Still, nice as it is the 3D doesn’t add as much depth to proceedings as you might expect and for all the digital wonder on display, I was more convinced by Roger Rabbit’s “key lit” toons of twenty years ago.

As writers, Miller and Lord with one eye on postmodern parents (It’s “a film by a lot of people” according to the opening credits) have fun with some broad satirical swipes at the media and America’s culture of mass overconsumption. Anna Farris lends her voice to the heroes’ weathergirl love interest whose beauty has her dismissed as brain dead eye candy by the TV station’s misogynist anchor. There’s also a neat little poke at the culture of pointless celebrity with the town’s childhood sardine mascot ‘Baby’ Brent, still performing the role in his teens, nappy and all. With children’s movies there’s always the potential pitfall that the filmmakers may talk down to their audience, but thankfully Meatballs celebrates intelligence and individuality which gives it an endearing quality.

The town’s immersion in oversized food portions leads to a health crisis with the typically corrupt town mayor ballooning in weight – his appearance akin to a bloated Mayor Vaughn from Jaws touched by Animal Farm’s Napoleon. The townspeople follow suit – their homegrown sardine industry abandoned in favour of gluttonous largesse. A useful machine scoops up the uneaten grub, “out of sight and out of mind” and deposits it into ‘Mount Leftovers’, so that the movie occasionally resembles one of those Gillian McKeath food programmes. Fortunately, Lord and Miller don’t go as far as having their balloon headed characters rifling through their own excrement.

The gently subversive tone makes it more entertaining than most movies of its type but those expecting it to overturn the core reverence to kith and kin need not attend. The inventors father (James Caan!), a sardine fisherman, is the movie’s conscience and his old school, meat and potatoes work ethic guarantees that the sentiment is never underwritten by cynicism as it is in some adult cartoons like The Simpsons and Family Guy. Uncle Walt would approve.

There are some shoulder shaking slapstick moments – a couple of heels into eyes for example, as well as some neat sight gags. A robotically minded television looting a TV shop and stealing the customer was my favourite, and Flintwood’s pet monkey “Steve” provides much mirth with a ‘thought translation’ device that makes him sound like the bastard child of Stephen Hawking and a Speak and Spell.

It’s bright enough, inventive enough and witty enough to make up for the fact that it’s fractionally overlong and the 3D presentation, though adding little, does make the finely rendered animation a touch more immersive.

The movie ends on something of a saccharine note as these things are prone to do with everyone loving everyone else and a particularly syrup drenched closing track threatening to turn the stomach as you head for the exit. But as the camera pulls back into the clouds to reveal a town covered in thousands of tons of uneaten fruit, meat and confectionary, the mind turned to what might happen when it started to rot. Surely such a large amount of fetid, maggot infested, putrefying matter would spread disease like wildfire and act as a catalyst for scenes evoking 14th century Europe in the grip of the plague? Now, who’s hungry?

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