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These days, it seems that most movies for kids tend to be wacky animated adventures with crazy characters, wild action, and random stories. Even Pixar movies have their share of slapstick silliness. But they don’t get a whole lot wackier or more random than the feathered frenzy of Storks.
Storks takes off on a high-flying quest with Junior (voiced by Andy Samberg), an ambitious Cornerstore.com delivery stork who’s determined to earn his promotion to Boss. Before he can take charge of the factory, however, he’s given just one task: fire Tulip (Katie Crown), the misfit orphan girl whose mishandled delivery ended the storks’ baby delivering venture for good. But when Tulip inadvertently restarts the baby factory and produces one lovable little baby, Junior has just a couple of days to deliver the baby in secret and nab his big promotion.
Storks is a frantic animated adventure that seems specially designed for the ADHD crowd. Instead of taking the time to develop a moderately coherent story, it simply flings a bunch of crazy ideas and silly characters at kids, hoping to distract them with its goofiness.
At times, it seems as though directors Nicholas Stoller and Doug Sweetland were trying to recreate the kind of smart yet spastic wackiness of movies like executive producer Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s geeky comedies, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and The LEGO Movie. Parts often seem borrowed from those other films. But Storks is not nearly as smart, and it’s a whole lot more spastic. It’s jam-packed with strange (and often obnoxious) characters—like Pigeon Toady (Stephen Kramer Glickman), a completely perplexing character who seems to be a former surfer pigeon turned desperate office tattletale.
Meanwhile, the story feels forced, and it has a tendency to wander off in all kinds of strange and often head-scratching directions as the stork and the orphan girl work together to care for a baby while crashing planes and outrunning wolves in a quest to track down a family that also happens to be building a massive baby-catching contraption on their roof. And while it may keep kids laughing with its non-stop random insanity, it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Admittedly, Storks does have a few clever moments—but if you’ve seen the film’s trailers, you’ve pretty much seen them all. So unless you’re desperate for a way to keep a bunch of sugared-up kids entertained for 90 minutes, you might want to stick with something a little less chaotic.
Listen to the review on Reel Discovery:
