A BUNDLE OF FUN
Latest animated flick from Warner offers up plenty of enthusiastic lunacy
The recently rebranded Warner Animation Group got off to a fine start in 2014 with The Lego Movie, a critical and commercial hit with an earworm song to boot.
Storks, the studio’s sophomore effort, may not have the same staying power, but what it lacks in quality it more than makes up for in enthusiastic lunacy. Oh, and there’s a new Lego short before the main feature.
The backstory needs a little unpacking. Storks used to deliver babies, but now they carry packages for the fictional cornerstore.com — at least until drones take over. In the meantime, Junior (Andy Samberg) is poised to take over the company from outgoing CEO Hunter (Kelsey Grammer).
Before that can happen, however, there’s one more baby to deliver.
A little boy named Nate has managed to get a letter through to the baby factory, where a human orphan in the shuttered mail room — she’s something of a dead letter herself, since the storks lost her delivery details 18 years earlier — puts the machinery into action.
(This is easily the only time a scene of accidental conception will ever get a G rating.)
Now Junior and the orphan, Tulip (Katie Crown), must get the bundle of joy safely delivered before the boss finds out.
But they’re blocked by a suspicious pigeon (Stephen Kramer Glickman), a deranged stork (Danny Trejo) who wants a baby of his own, and a pack of wolves, led by Keegan-Michael Kay, who aren’t sure whether to eat the infant or raise it, Mowgli-style.
All this gives Storks, written by co-director Nicholas Stoller (Get Him to the Greek, Neighbors), a licence to engage in various highspeed chases, slapstick violence and other mayhem.
Some of these antics are amazingly creative, such as the wolves’ Wonder-Twin-like ability to morph into a variety of vehicles and structures.
And some — an off-screen cat hit by a flying object; a giant exo-suit, built by For No Good Reason Enterprises (a division of Because We Can Incorporated) — are lazier than cereal straight from the box.
In the film’s semi-quiet moments, Samberg and Crown manage some nice banter, and there’s the requisite feel-good subplot about finding your family and/or creating one.
There are also a few unanswered questions, such as why so many stork-crafted babies are “born” with pre-dyed hair. I don’t think there’s a genetic marker for pink locks.
But the overwhelming lesson of Storks is simple: Don’t be asking where things come from. The answers may upset you.