Phil Lord and Chris Miller are such popular, in-demand filmmakers- with a strong reputation for turning questionable ideas into beloved, successful films -that it’s easy to forget they were more or less complete unknowns as little as five years ago. If they were known at all, it was for their work co-creating/directing/starring in Bill Lawrence’s weird, cult MTV cartoon Clone High. But, as is evident in the word “cult,” the people who knew of them were minimal, and the rest of America had no idea what to expect when the duo make their feature film debut in September of 2009.

The film opens with the anti-auteurist statement declaring that Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is “a film by… a lot of people.” Yet despite this admirable claim the film is a perfect synthesis of the themes and style that would come to define a Lord & Miller Production. Chief among these is the mashing together of the childish and the adult, and putting forth the idea that there is no line between them.

Cloudy is an adaptation of a children’s picture book, and because of this the basic plot is very simple and based in childlike logic. After all, our premise is that there’s a town called Swallow Falls in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that produces sardines, and since the rest of the world no longer buys sardines the citizens of this island are forced to live solely on these tiny, salty fish. Looking for a solution to this problem, our protagonist, Flint (Bill Hader) invents a machine that turns water into any kind of food he wants.

Yet there’s an interesting wrinkle here. Though the broad strokes are very childlike, the characters use an extensive and very real scientific vocabulary when describing the molecular makeup of different foods and mechanical parts. That accuracy stops well short of trying to realistically explain how the machine performs its strange alchemy, but that’s part of the point. Adulthood isn’t an unattainable thing or a magical transformation, it’s just another form of pretending. (My favorite throwaway gag about this is the fact that whenever Flint is typing code on his computer, his fingers are just button mashing the keyboard.)

This concept is further driven home by the story arc of Sam Sparks (Anna Faris) an intern for a major news outlet that sends her to Swallow Falls to cover the town’s reinvention. We learn that Sam was a nerdy kid with glasses and a ponytail who was mercilessly made fun of by the other kids in her class. (“Four eyes! Four eyes! You need glasses to see!”) Though Sam acknowledges that the taunt wasn’t particularly clever, it proved to be toxically effective. She stopped wearing glasses and does her best to be perky and dumb, the path of least resistance. When she finally works up the self-esteem to wear her glasses and her hair the way she likes it again, she is immediately made fun of by the anchor back to the news outlet’s head anchor. His vocabulary is more sophisticated, but the cruelty is just as childish.

Another key component of Lord & Miller’s style on full display here is the duo’s unique sense of humor. While Hollywood is (then and now) largely dominated by the loose, improvisational humor of Apatow and his proteges, Lord & Miller are much more tightly scripted and laser focused, playing with fast banter and constructing jokes through editing much more akin to the films of Edgar Wright. (Consider this sequence where Flint tries to call Sam to ask her on a date.)

There’s also a level of weirdness to their humor that’s rare in mainstream Hollywood comedies, such as a sequence where Flint has to keep Sam distracted while he sets up his lab, which ends with the punchline “I can’t believe we’ve been watching this for three hours!” Another good example is the scene where the town’s corrupted mayor (Bruce Campbell) convinces Flint to keep his machine running after it’s been discovered that the food is mutating. The shot is locked down on Flint, standing perfectly centered in the frame, while the Mayor’s face slowly moves in and out of frame from every side of the screen, all while speaking in a very calm, steady voice. There’s no actual joke here, just the strange visual construct of a very fat man moving impossibly around a small space.

Hilarious as the movie is, its secret weapon is the melancholy lurking just beneath its silliness. For all his goofy inventions and persistence in becoming a brilliant inventor, Flint is a very sad, lonely character. He’s been labeled a weirdo by the town and his father thinks his talents lie elsewhere. Flint is so starved for affection it’s easy to understand why he continues to let his food machine run even after it’s clear something’s gone wrong with it. Perhaps the movie’s greatest strength is the fact that there is no villain, something almost unheard of in children’s films. You could argue that the Mayor is the villain, but he’s merely greedy and gluttonous. He’s only partially responsible for the disaster in the film’s final third, and it’s not the Mayor Flint has to defeat at the end, but the consequences of his own hubris.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is an impressive debut, and nothing has been lost in the five years since its premiere. It’s sharp, incisive, funny, moving, and wonderfully goofy as any animated film in recent memory.