Don’t Be Ashamed to Enjoy Cartoons Like This
Flint Lockwood, an inventor, creates a machine that synthesizes food. Everyone is thrilled until it starts raining meatballs and spaghetti.
We’ve all had those heretical thoughts as kids, crawling under tables and sneaking caramels from the cupboard, thoughts that give a new perspective to reasonable ideas about the world. Like, what if caramels were the size of a house, and parents were the size of a small caramel? What would the cavities be like in that case? And would you have to wrap Mom and Dad in candy wrappers? They need somewhere to live, after all.
History shows that adults who haven’t lost the ability to think about such things seriously achieve interesting results. A cartoon about oversized food falling from the sky in apocalyptic quantities is precisely such a result. It seems the childhood that turned the creators of this gastronomic tornado’s heads never really disappeared; it was just waiting for its moment. How else can you explain the truly demiurgic impulse with which grown men spent a hundred million dollars to realize their kindergarten-level fantasies in 3D? That’s how much it cost the producers to have a fun food fight with people for an hour and a half.
The Parents’ Dilemma
It’s understandable that parents who’ve spent so much effort preventing their kids from acting up at the table and throwing macaroni at the cat are upset when they take the whole family to the cinema and see something like that on screen. The main character plugs the hellish horn of plenty, performing a personal feat, but that doesn’t solve the problem: a spaghetti strand worn as a hat and a donut smashing through a roof will still be etched in the child’s memory.
A Different Perspective
On the other hand, the simple idea that if food becomes bigger than a person, it kills that person, seems more effective from an educational point of view than the conclusions one might draw from “Ratatouille,” another adventure cartoon about food, but one that turns it into an idée fixe.