The Laws of Physics in an Animated Universe

Cartoon Physics in Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs

The film Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs takes place in an eccentric world filled with eccentric characters who are constantly, eccentrically, stretching the laws of physics. The inhabitants of Swallow Falls are thin, noodle-y people (or, at least they are at the beginning of the movie) who move very deliberately between poses as they interact with one another and their environments. In fact, everything in this universe occurs with a sense of extremely exaggerated realism where every pose is pushed, every reaction is overacted, and all motion is cranked to the max, all for the sake of comedy. A few key eccentricities of this universe that interest me are the surprising strength of the film's rat birds, the characters' ability to hold unbalanced poses for impossible lengths of time, and their incredible durability in regards to absorbing physical damage.

Really, just don't mess with these guys.

First off is the mysterious strength of the rat birds. Native to swallow falls, the rat bird (Verminus, uh, Bird...us) is a hybrid creature of artificial origin. Created by Flint Lockwood during his inventive teen years, rat birds possess uncanny strength. A single rat bird has the capability to carry off a small child and in groups they are able to lift fully grown men. To understand the flight capability of the rat bird, we must first analyze how bird birds fly. The process of avian flight is more complex than simply rapidly displacing air- it is a series of adapted specializations that come together that ultimately enable flight to occur. Hollow bones, feathers, specialized muscles, and adapted organ systems all play a part in assisting birds to fly, whereas the rat birds in Cloudy only seem to have wings with some feathers. The location of the rat bird's wings on its hips makes comparing its flight capabilities to that of a standard bird even more difficult since real bird's wings are analogous to the forelimbs of mammal with similar anatomy and skeletal structure. However, assuming that rat birds possess all the necessary inner mechanics to manipulate their wings in an analogous manner to their naturally air-bound cousins, there are numerous aspects of how their flight is exhibited in the film that is not physically logical. The first instance of this occurs approximately eight minutes into the film when a lone rat bird kidnaps young Billy. The creature's total screen time is about 1.8 seconds divided evenly between its descent and ascent with the newly acquired child. This information is enough to indicate the laws of physics of have been disobeyed. Observing the size of the rat bird relative to Billy, and assuming that the creature does not have the lightweight skeleton adaptation that normal birds have, I would guess that it weighs somewhere between 16-24oz (1-1.5lbs.), putting it in the same class as the typical barn owl. Because it did not attempt a swooping kidnapping at high speeds which would have offered greater consistent lift to the rat bird since it would have kept air flowing around the airfoil of its wings, and because it instead chose a mostly vertical approach, slowing its descent towards Billy would have taken several times longer and been much less linear than it appeared in the film. After acquiring the extra heft of the young child, generating enough lift to rise back out of the frame would have taken significantly more time and effort than what was witnessed in the short interaction and would certainly have taken a much longer expanse of time than it took for it to descend. (not to mention that a rat bird of that size, flapping its wings at that speed, would not have been able to lift the child in the first place.)

An other instance in this film where rat birds exhibit unnaturally powerful airborne capabilities occurs near the end as they descend from the heavens carrying the hero. This occurs 1 hour and 19 minutes in and the swarm contains about 25-30 rat birds. Despite some of the creatures flying on the outside of the swarm and seemingly serving no purpose in lifting Flint, the relative ease with which the rest of them are able to carry him is in line with their previous exhibition of strength regarding Billy at the beginning of the movie.

Moving on to the non-mutated bipedal characters in Cloudy, the humans in this film-- in certain situations-- exhibit an unnatural ability to maintain unbalanced poses for quite a lengthy period of time. One of the first examples of this occurs 11 minutes and 45 seconds into the movie when Flint Lockwood hides the FLDSMDFR (Flint Lockwood’s Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator) behind his back while talking to Earl the policeman.

Blue: Base of Support/Green: Line of Gravity/Red: Center of Gravity/ Yellow: Realistic Pose Indicator

While it’s hard to gauge Flint’s exact weight due to the fact that he has the same proportions as a tall noodle, I’m going to assume he’s ~5’8” tall and around 120lbs. We'll estimate the weight of the FLDSMDFR and Steve The Monkey to be somewhere around 30lbs total. Now, at any weight Flint would have to alter his stance to compensate for these items, but at a quarter of his total weight he would have to severely hunch forward in order to position the Center of Gravity back over his Base of Support. Obviously, he can't do this in the shot since the audience has to believe that Earl somehow can't see Flint carrying the device, so the sacrifice of realism is made. In a following close up shot, Flint not only fails to compensate for the weight of the items he's carrying, but he actually leans in the wrong direction, so shooting it in close up may not have only served an aesthetic purpose but also served to hide what would certainly have been a noticeably impossible pose. On the other hand, Earl's Center and Line of Gravity line up nicely with his base of support so his pose is quite believable. In fact, Earl display's a good sense of realistic gravity through the movie. At 1 hour and 7 minutes in, we can see him running away from a food-alanche while carrying a grilled cheese sailboat. Even though he's holding the boat above his head near the rear, the weight of his wife and child along with the pizza sail being above him instead of the swiss cheese sail combine to help keep it realistically balanced above him. Furthermore, since he is running with boat, if the Center of Gravity is still assumed to be somewhat in front of his hands and feet, his consistent forward momentum would be preventing it from falling thus making the pose more believable.

One final feature of the Cloudy universe that cements its physical laws firmly within the cartoon realm instead of realism is the durability of its characters in regards to concussive impact. This is repeatedly witnessed during the ice cream snow day scene. For instance, in one shot Earl and his son Calvin go sledding from a rooftop directly into a dumpster, which Earl hits firmly with his gut.

(...)

It takes Earl about 8 frames-- 1/3^rd of a second-- to travel from the roof to the dumpster. If we were to assume that the rooftop sits at a height of 10ft and the part of the dumpster that stops Earl hits is 4ft high, then that's a 6ft drop in a third of a second. This converts to slightly less than 13mph since fast motions are often slowed in animation so that the viewer can see the action. Nevertheless, an impact at that speed to the gut would have taken a normal human quite a bit longer to recover from than it took Earl. This, however, perhaps is not as much a testimony towards the unrealistic nature of the film as it is towards the manly-manliness of Earl.

Moments after this shot, we see another case of extreme impact with little damage done when Flint engages in his first snow ball fight. With much enthusiasm, Flint discovers the joy of throwing snowballs and hits numerous little children with these high velocity projectiles.

In the first shot of this, he is able to hurl a snowball at Cal from 6ft away and hit him two frames later. This would put the snowball at almost 50mph. Understandably, Cal goes flying. However, he is heard laughing as he is pelted with the delicious, high velocity projectile. In fact, most of the victims of Flint's enthusiasm are shown with a smile on their faces moments after receiving an icey snowball in the face.

What does it all mean?

These are but a few examples of situations where the animators of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs took liberties in their handling of physical laws. Yet, if the viewer analyzes each situation, they'll come to notice that it is never done without purpose. The malleability of these laws in an animated universe is one of the benefits of working in the medium of animation and when an animator understands how objects behave physically in reality they are able to competently push those same objects in a fictional environment to create better films.