As you can imagine, the film looks gorgeous in Blu-ray. Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs is an exceptionally colorful film, and it feels made for this kind of home viewing format. For those who don’t own a Blu-ray player but think they may take the plunge in the near future, the Blu-ray is packaged with a regular DVD as well, which features a full and widescreen version in addition to a downloadable copy of the film. It’s a great bang-for-your-buck if you want don’t want to double-dip in the future. If you have a Blu-ray player, this is the ideal package to grab. The digital copy is the only downer, however. While most other releases with a digital copy offer a Windows Media and iTunes friendly download, this digital copy is only workable with a Playstation 3 or PSP. If you have a PS3, you won’t really need the downloadable copy unless you absolutely want to store this on the player (which just uses up hard drive space). Otherwise, it’s really only a bonus if you’re a PSP user as well.

The Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs Special Features include some pretty fun little additions. For starters, there’s a “Splat-Mode” to enable when viewing the film. Basically, it’s a pop-up feature that allows you to literally hurl a slice of pie, egg, meatball, or cream pie at the screen at the mere push of a button. While in the Splat-Mode, you can also squeegee the screen clean at a click, or turn it off entirely. I can’t imagine it being something you’d want to keep on for the duration of the movie (and I’m sure it would get old quickly for anyone watching it while someone is playing with the feature). “Flint’s Food Fight Game” is a pretty fun little game in the same vein as the classic arcade game Galaga, where you are a little ship firing forks at food spiraling around a giant meatball.

In addition to the games, there are several behind-the-scenes featurettes. The first, besides a feature commentary by the directors (and the voice of Flint, Bill Hader), is “A Recipe for Success: The Making of Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs.” It’s the perfect glance into what went into making the movie, including interviews with the voice actors, directors, producers, and animators. Details from colorization and set design to even planning out how the food might fall and land in a given scene are covered in this revealing featurette. The next featurette is “Key Ingredients: The Voices of Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs.” Personally, when it comes to animated films I’ve enjoyed like this one, I’m often interested in learning more about the voice acting and even getting to see some footage from the recording sessions with the actors. “Key Ingredients” is a satisfying look into this, as Anna Faris, Hader, Andy Samberg, James Caan, Bruce Campbell, and even Mr. T and Al Roker all get to talk about their roles. It’s definitely the highlight of the special features.

Miranda Cosgrove singing "Raining Sunshine"

To round out the features, Two alternate/extended scenes are included, the best of which is the completed footage of a food fight between Flint and the Mayor. Two animated storyboard “Early Development” scenes are also included with audio to give a rough idea of some initial scene concepts. Another cool feature breaks down the lighting and visual effects of the film, giving art concepts versus final art scenes, and we see the layers of lighting used in several examples get peeled away to show how the scene was constructed. Miranda Cosgrove’s “Raining Sunshine” video is also included. Surprisingly, it’s the only feature that seems to not be in HD, and looks rather terrible compared to the rest of the HD features (the behind-the-scenes video doesn’t look any better either). It’s a rather corny video, but it’s something younger viewers will probably enjoy most. Lastly, the “Make It Rain Food” spot is a brief commerical for feedingamerica.org urging viewers to join the the fight against hunger.

In the end, Sony does a great job wrapping up Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs for fans of the film to take home and enjoy time and time again. It’s a fun animated film for the whole family and a great addition to your home video collection.