'Storks' Is Good Fun that Could Make You Think
It isn’t often that a film delivers crisp, well developed visuals, a stunning voice cast, a quiet elegance and a plot worth not just praise but introspection. Kids’ movies are known for their colors and sounds and poop jokes, but the genre has begun to craft a reputation as a bastion for contemporary looks into society.
“Storks,” a film produced by the Warner Animation Group, despite its flaws, delivers an energetic, and at times overly loud, exploration of the American family while challenging our societal ideas about success, reaching your dreams and the risks of changing the status quo.
The film begins with, as the title suggests, storks delivering babies to families. Unlike in the tales, the Storks are no longer delivering babies, but shipping packages. Apparently the titular birds had started to disregard their mission and began keeping the babies for themselves.
One such incident is shown at the beginning of the movie, ending in one child, Tulip, remaining stuck with the Storks’ company ‘Cornerstore’ rather than reaching her actual family. While Tulip struggles to fit in with her adoptive family, Nate Gardner, a child with work-obsessed parents, orders a sibling, activating the conflict of the film: Will the Storks deliver babies again?
The Gardner family seems like the quintessential American family: two successful parents and a bright young boy, living in a nice house in the suburbs. Both parents work and the boy is creative and does not want for food, clothes or toys. But underneath this idyllic set up is the first societal flaw—both parents are addicted to working and don’t have time to play with their son. Lonely, he orders a sibling through an old Cornerstore pamphlet by sending them a letter with the specifics of his perfect sibling.
At Cornerstore, Tulip is put in charge of the defunct letter department and inadvertently creates a baby while working, setting events into play that could change the company forever. Junior, a rising stork leader, decides that in order to save his company’s reputation and preserve his upcoming promotion, he and Tulip must deliver the child to their family.
Throughout the film, the corporate world is lampooned through the inner workings of Cornerstore, showing the rampant selfishness, disregard for safety and obsession with wealth and success that so often fills our ideas of what large business looks like. The Gardner family feeds this image as well, with the two parents so obsessed with making their realty company grow that they nearly forget their own son.
Despite these critiques of our current society, what the filmmakers sought to portray in a family film is not the biggest question. Rather, the most inordinately unquestioned detail of the film, the baby factory, is ignored until the movie’s climax.
What does the film imply by having a literal factory for creating perfect children? If you want a child with super-intelligence and blue hair, or a baby with ninja skills and pink eyes, you can have one- and soon, that may not just be in movie-world. But what does that mean for the parents and families of Earth? Was there a time when men and women did not reproduce themselves? The science behind even making this possible is incredulously nuts. Also the storks use their wings as hands, which is just ridiculous.
No matter what your take is on the issues that “Storks” raises, scientifically, societally or narratively, the colorful and high-speed buddy film is sure to entertain children and adults alike.
