Recently, I went to a screening at the Warner Bros. lot of the new Warner Bros. Pictures animated film “Storks,” coming out in theaters on Friday, Sept. 23rd. It was an elaborate affair, with tons of kids, giant versions of the movie’s characters walking around, and lots of pizza, hamburgers and candy.
In you’re in Los Angeles, you’d have to be blind to miss all the “Storks” billboards, bus wraps and other marketing material. “Storks” also features such big-name voice talent as Andy Samberg, Kelsey Grammer and Jennifer Aniston.
Too bad the movie is a frenetic, confusing, incoherent, exhausting mess. It starts with the premise that storks have stopped delivering babies to now deliver packages, but buried in the bowels of their Amazon-like company is a giant machine that somehow turns letters into human babies.
Not even Santa’s North Pole elves could manage that one.
From my review at Family Theater Productions’ Faith & Family Media Blog:
Normally, our friends in Hollywood love to teach kids about the birds and the bees in any way they can, as young as possible. The exception is the new PG-rated animated film “Storks,” coming out Friday, Sept. 23. It endeavors to rewrite human biology in a way that not only disconnects having children from sex between men and women — it detaches it from any human effort at all, beyond writing and mailing a letter.
…
There’s something in the movie about finding your family, and some warm feelings about the wonderfulness of babies, but they’re utterly buried under the loud, frenetic, breathless, endless string of sight gags and jokes, with nothing approaching sense knitting them together.
Also, we’re not entirely sure how babies are still produced in this fantasy world, where humans are created in the bowels of a giant, Rube Golbergian machine and popped out, fully formed, in metal contraptions. There’s no attempt to talk about how babies actually come into the world, how long the storks’ facility has been idle, and whether it’s the only source of human life.
At one point, untold thousands of letters from the past are fed into the machine, and babies of every hue, with hair in the colors of the rainbow, are spewed out. The storks then deliver them all over the world, to adults of every sort — including both same-sex and opposite-sex couples — who all seem thrilled to get them, despite perhaps having waited decades for a letter to be answered.
(The couples also all appear to be between 25 and 40, even though any kind of logic would dictate that some of them would be a lot older and wondering how they’re going to parent a child in their golden years.)
Click here to read the whole thing (and see a compilation of trailers).
Images: Warner Animation Group
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