So I rented the kids animated movie Storks on iTunes – this is a movie I skipped at the theaters because it looked like a baby movie for babies (with Kelsey Grammer doing so amusing voice work). I almost went to see it when I started hearing it was legit funny but it left theaters before I worked up the belief that maybe they were right.
And they were right – Storks is a surprisingly funny – absurdistly so – movie about storks delivering babies. Who knew?
Premise is that storks are no longer delivering babies but now deliver packages for CornerStore.com…. but a (human) boy wants a little brother (with ninja skills) so writes the storks for one. His parents point out the storks don’t deliver babies any more but “there are plenty of other ways to have babies”… a point the movie amusingly never follows-up on. “Please tell me more, kid’s movie!”
Well, anyway, that letter accidentally gets processes by the giant machine that turns letters into babies (through paper-based mitosis) and now the ace stork and the abandoned human who grew up in the factory have to deliver that baby before the grouchy boss (played by Kesley Grammer) finds out.
I laughed. That’s about it. Some of the jokes were just weird and absurd and the more weird and absurd, the better. For example, the heroes are being chased across a swinging rope bridge by a pack of wolves. They cut the rope to escape so the alpha wolf says to the rest of the pack, “Wolf Pack – Form Of: Suspension Bridge” and the wolves link together like ants to create a bridge. It’s dumb to explain but the more they play up the Wonder Twins joke of it, the more I laughed.
And, yes, the movie plays up cute babies hard and it usually works and is legitimately touching and emotional about it.
So, yeah, it’s an odd movie that works because I think it knows it had to pull something out of its bag of tricks or it wouldn’t appeal to a wider audience. It works. I laughed. I think kids would laugh at it differently than adults and that’s what an animated flick needs to do if it’s gonna be more than just a babysitter.
Score: 84