3. Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs (2009)
The book version of
Cloud With A Chance Of Meatballs is 32 pages long. None of the characters that appear in the movie are in the original. All the raining food is caused by a machine in the movie version, as opposed to the "natural" phenomena of the book. As you can probably guess, this is an adaptation that takes a lot of liberties with its source material, though in this case it was actually justified, given the short length of the original book. So instead of the quiet, reflective original, we got a loud, explosive, zany and colourful CG-animated 3D flick. I don't mean to make that sound like a bad thing:
Meatballs is fine animated fare, different enough from its source material to be considered an interpretation, but encompassing of the some of the most poignant themes. The original book, which was written by Judi Barrett and illustrated by Ron Barrett, also takes the form of a story being told by a grandfather to his grandchildren, which the adaptation excludes entirely. If it sounds like the only thing that transfered over here was "food raining from the sky," then, that's because it's basically true.