It’s a dark room, filled with parents enjoying the diminished responsibility that the cinema affords them, their offspring clutching oversized 3D goggles to their faces and staring intently at the screen. Suddenly the two main characters in Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs are inside a massive mansion, made out of a large moulded jelly (or Jell-O as they call it in the States). One child shouts out ‘JELLY!!!’, and there are echoes of this word chirped around the room. As the characters begin to enjoy the jelly palace, diving and bouncing around, one kid simply shouts out ‘YAAAAAAAYYYYAH!’ because of the sheer joy the animation has induced. I was sitting nearby, quietly experiencing a similar feeling.

Later on, a monkey with a voice box is fighting sentient gummy bears on the wing of a flying car. The monkey pulls some Rafiki-esque moves, before confronting one gummy bear, plunging his paw into the translucent midsection and removing a globule of the sweet innards, which he holds aloft with a scream of victory before gobbling down. The kids don’t seem to get the reference, but my friend and I, who are old enough to have seen kung fu movies, are left gagging on our popcorn in delight. This is just a single example from a string of subversive, slightly disturbing jokes and references that litter the movie. You might be able to tell that I thoroughly enjoyed Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the latest offering from Sony Pictures Animation, who haven’t really produced the goods in recent years with such stiff competition from Disney Pixar and Dreamworks. However, they’ve finally got it right, and I urge people of all ages to see this film.

The plot is suitably whacky and based on a kids book from the late 70s of the same name. Flint Lockwood, a young scientist who’s constantly producing inventions that never quite work, is stranded on a stagnating mid-Atlantic island which hasn’t been the same since the whole world realised that it’s only export, sardines, were ‘super gross’. Flint isn’t perturbed by his many failures, and he succeeds in making a machine that can turn water into food, which rockets into the sky when he plugs it into the national power grid. From that point on it starts raining food, and Flint can send the machine orders to produce an infinite menu of snacks. Weather intern Sam Sparks is sent over from the main land to cover the breaking news, and a haphazard relationship develops between her and the terminally geeky Flint. The publicity also turns the island into a tourist attraction once more, though as the masses gather to see what all the fuss is about, the machine in the sky goes ballistic and mutations occur.

I’ve already touched on how visually engaging this film is, but it is also extremely well written, full of gags that are purposefully designed to sail over the heads of the children in the audience and hit home with their unsuspecting parents. Or childless adults like me. Every few moments there are lines which sparkle, helped significantly by perfect comic timing and delivery, and even when there’s something being said there’s almost always another visual gag playing out in the background. There’s even a critique of capitalism and consumer excess that occasionally rears its head, but it’s never obtrusive and the playful nature of the whole piece isn’t jeopardised. In short this is a very funny film. It’s funnier than Funny People. And it’s an hour shorter. And in 3D. What more could you want?