Storks truly does idealise a world in which parents get their little bundle of joy delivered, which makes you wonder things like: Does actual birth not exist in this movie? It's not every high concept that rewrites the basic rules of the human race.Įven if you watch Storks and think, four-year-olds will really dig it (and perhaps they will), frenetic and witless is not a great combination. Taken literally, though, it presents problems. The myth of the stork delivering babies is certainly an entrenched part of our culture, and a long time ago it was a convenient wink of a way to explain procreation to young children. We're supposed to be rooting for a return to the good old days.īut in Storks, even the good old days seem a bit.off. They're couriers of Internet consumerism, and the movie treats the situation they're in as a fall from grace, like the toys in Toy Story 3 after they were relegated to a scruffy day-care playroom. Now, the birds work for, delivering random products out of an elongated, train-car-shaped warehouse perched high up in the clouds. Our stork heroes, led by Junior (voiced by Andy Samberg at his most gee-whiz unironic and benign), once zipped through the skies toting babies in their beaks, the infants encased in what look like miniature space capsules. In this case, however, something may stick a bit in your craw.
The film's weird absence of ingratiation begins with its premise, which takes off from established fairy-tale folklore in the vein of Shrek or any comedy built around, say, the lives of elves in the North Pole. In the animated marketplace, quality still counts. The movie will probably enjoy a respectable opening weekend, but after that the situation looks dicier. Even if you watch Storks and think, four-year-olds will really dig it (and perhaps they will), frenetic and witless is not a great combination. In Storks, the jokes fall flat, but the pace is relentless, and those two things seem somehow intertwined, as if the filmmakers had convinced themselves that comedy that whips by fast enough won't go thud. These days, that's a relatively rare bird to encounter, since animated filmmaking right now tends to hit certain baseline slick levels of amiable generic cleverness.
Storks, the new digital cartoon about a crew of sharp-beaked, flamingo-legged birds who deliver babies (or used to they now deliver consumer packages - but we'll get to that in a minute), is a strenuously unfunny animated comedy.
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