★★★
Some things are perplexing from the get go: take Trump’s rise to power, daylight savings, algebra and the animated film Storks as just a few examples. Indeed, with its eclectic mix of avian creatures, a pack of supremely collaborative wolves, a pink-haired baby, a red-haired teen and a massive trip down anti-establishment road, Storks sure is one wild experience.
The film opens with a scene of organised chaos in a gargantuan warehouse. Forget about Amazon: in this reality it’s the storks who will always deliver. But it’s not babies that the birds are dropping off any more – with eCommerce burgeoning and online shopping off the charts, the profit margins are all in parcel delivery and the storks are cashing in. They stopped delivering babies years ago, the only reminder of that world represented by Tulip (Katie Crown) a misplaced human who was never delivered and now lives with the birds.
The film starts quickly: too quickly. We are thrust into a world of avian delivery markets, full of efficiencies of scale and low overheads, with little explanation. Before long the storks accidentally produce a pink baby (don’t worry: sans copulation) and there begins the mission to deliver the little tot, something the birds barely remember how to do.
Unfortunately, you simply aren’t given enough time to care about the main protagonists, and a lot of questions begin to circle around as a result. It’s difficult to reconcile the old fable of storks within the modern context of the film, and it’s unclear whether all this is meant to be farce or metaphor.
I mean, let’s break it down: storks once delivered babies, then they stopped. Babies were still born in the interim – weren’t they? Was sex magically invented in that time to close the product gap? Did this biological mechanism spring forth from the economic flux of supply and demand? Did human biology suddenly evolve to cater for the product deficit?
All that being said, Storks still excels in intense moments of absurd character comedy and dialogue delivery. Simply put, it’s hella funny. The film is full of fiendishly facetious asides involving wolves, a weird stoner pigeon and a gaggle of penguins. Yet at times that only really highlights how un-amusing Tulip is, and her lack of charisma is the movie’s real weakpoint.
It’s almost as if the creative team had been saving up hilarious jokes that they dreamt up by the by, pouring them into a film, lightly fluffing something about storks to tie it all together
