cloudy with achance of meatballs book illustrations

Until it's not, at a suggested twist ending.While Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is of course first and foremost simply a fun romp, both Judi Barret’s narrative and Ron Barrett’s accompanying artwork also manage to convey rather vividly how food can become a rather massive problem when it is uncontrollable or uncontrolled. The children have been largely dispensed with as well as the original subject and it all becomes the grandfather on a Mars mission in a dream. And at the end there's the entirely unnecessary suggestion that despite the framing device, the town of the subject was, in fact, real.Īnd that went on for a while longer until somebody needed to pay for a roof or something and the third one was excreted. It's a coarser story, with less hey-look-at-that fun and deliberate callbacks to the original without really making it new or different.

This time, one of the children experiences it as a dream. The sequel had its charms-sort of-and was based on the same idea but a different framing device. But it did not come to pass.Īnd so this existed for many many years, enjoyed by many many children and their parents (appreciating it at a deeper and more sophisticated level and not because people running from giant donuts and massive half-sour pickles penetrating a roof), until someone decided that it needed a sequel. All unrelated, all interesting, all different. You can sort of see the hook, of a series of stories all based on the imaginative grandfather's tall tales. And so forth.Īfter the grandfather finishes his tall tale about a town where food falls from the sky, the next day dawns and life continues, and nobody thinks that the story was anything other than that.

Poor Floyd, whose birthday cake was cobbled from brussel sprouts, peanut butter, and mayonnaise. A baseball game called 'on account of pie'. Small election posters for Stu Pott and Anne Chovie. Traffic snarled on Lower Intestine Street, for instance. It was intricately illustrated, with little sight gags that observant readers-parents-could pick out. It had the perfect framing device, of a grandfather spinning a tall tale tangentially related to the day's events, and the bulk of the story, the story within the story, is nothing more than that. Once upon a time, there was the perfect children's book (not this one).

Cloudy with achance of meatballs book illustrations