In the end, Storks doesn’t quite deliver
The question of “Where do babies come from?” has been answered, throughout movie history, with some unsavoury characters. In the case of Rosemary’s Baby, a demonic neighbour was to blame. In Knocked Up, it was Seth Rogen’s doing. The truth can hurt.
But evading the query has its own lineage, too, and in Storks, the cop-out answer — one I suspect most toddlers don’t even buy — has been given the full animated movie treatment. Storks, at least, has the sense to tweak the old myth (the folklore of babydelivering storks goes back before Hans Christian Anderson and runs all the way to Dumbo) and imagine the large birds more like Amazon delivery drones.
The storks, from their remote island enclave, have given up the baby business to embrace the more lucrative line of online sales. Now, they deliver things such as new cellphones to equally expectant customers, a flock right out of Jeff Bezos’ own heart.
Junior (Andy Samberg) is a company bird devoted to pleasing his suit-clad CEO (Kelsey Grammer). But his promotion is jeopardized when he fails to carry out an order to fire the place’s lone human worker, Tulip (Katie Crown), an orphan baby now grown and mostly wrecking the assembly lines.
You’d assume a movie about storks would inevitably be about parenting, but the film, directed by Nicholas Stoller and Doug Sweetland, is more about maintaining a work-family balance. Junior begins questioning his workplace allegiance while he and Tulip, having accidentally put the baby-making machinery back into action, desperately try to deliver a wished-for baby.
The baby request comes, by letter, from the lonely son (Anton Starkman) of an overworked realtor couple (Jennifer Aniston, Ty Burrell). In a nice touch, they work from home, a convenience that has obliterated their home life. “We never stop” is their mantra, one countless parents today can easily identify with. Their boy taunts them: “I’ll be in college in the blink of an eye.”
If there was more inquiry into this part of Storks, the film might have found its emotional core. But instead, the bumbling quest of Junior and Tulip takes precedence, as they elude things such as a pack of baby-smitten wolves. (Their leaders are voiced by KeeganMichael Key and Jordan Peele.)
Stoller, a comedy filmmaker (Neighbours, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) making his animated debut, and Sweetland, a veteran Pixar animator, come from different worlds and the mix of humour and sentiment doesn’t quite gel.
On the other hand, Samberg in bird-form is surprisingly true to Samberg the human. Storks has assimilated Samberg’s comic sensibility in G form. His goofy Junior is self-deprecating and sweet, and says “Cool beans.”
Executive produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The LEGO Movie), Storks has a lot of the ingredients for a playful, irreverent cartoon. One clever fight scene with penguins plays out in total quiet, so as not to wake baby.
But the movie doesn’t have enough to hang itself on; the premise is too flimsy and that old question of “Where do babies come from?” remains oddly avoided.