A bad case of Storkholm Syndrome

By Katherine Monk

Stick a stork in it, and you’re done. Am I right? How else to explain the big egg laid by Nicholas Stoller (Get Me to the Greek) and Doug Sweetland (Presto) called Storks?

An animated kids movie that’s guaranteed to confuse your children about sexual reproduction for years to come, Storks nests on the ancient and still eternally weird idea that storks bring babies to the front door in a swaddling bundle. No signature required.

This movie asserts that storks would still be delivering babies, if it weren’t for the actions of one rogue bird. Jasper (Danny Trejo) stole a baby and claimed it as his own, meaning storks got fired from their gig, and poor Tulip (Katie Crown) –the stolen baby secreted away as the storks’s shame– has grown up around a very different flock.

Stuck in some aviary high atop a mountain, Tulip suffers from a form of Stockholm Syndrome. She loves her feathered friends, but she dreams of flying, finding her human family and hanging out with Junior (Andy Samberg), the ace protégé of the alpha boss, Hunter (Kelsey Grammer).

Junior is an obedient follower because he is ambitious. He is climbing the corporate ladder at the storks’ sole employer, an on-line retailer called CornerStore.com that uses the stork fleet as a feathered delivery service.

In practical terms, the storks shuttered the infant factory, leaving humans to deliver the babies themselves. For little Nate Gardner (Anton Starkman), that means his request for a little brother with ninja skills has to go through his pathologically disconnected mother and father.

Mom and dad are real estate agents with Bluetooth earpieces permanently attached to their earlobes. They care about money and career, and have little time for Nate and his wacky ideas. As reflections of modern parents, they feel entirely two-dimensional, despite the big budget pixels sculpted in three dimensions.

Mom and dad are designed to prompt a latent sense of guilt, so when Nate finds an old reading primer featuring a stork that delivers babies, we’re sympathetic enough to overlook the obvious and the antiquated.

He writes the storks with a request for a little brother, and before you can say bird guano, the baby factory is turned on, a swaddling bundle in an Apollo-style re-entry capsule pops out of the gumball machine and Tulip and Junior are scanning the globe for a delivery address.

Surprisingly, the moronic plot isn’t the most irritating thing about this film. The script, as a whole, just hurts. Dipped in tart sass and coated in sarcasm – with the odd dramatic exclamation thrown in for good measure – Stoller’s (Zoolander 2) dialogue feels like random samplings of teenage phone conversation.

There’s an ambient sense of urgency, but it’s irrational. Nothing in this movie makes any sense at all, which isn’t all that damning a criticism for a cartoon, but even something as fragmented as Transformers had an internal sense of order and reason.

This movie can’t decide how babies are made, and it’s a central premise for the film, which means none of the action makes any dramatic sense. The emotional motives are the only thing that holds the film together – whether it’s Nate’s desire for a brother, Tulip’s wish for a human family, Junior’s eagerness to be boss or Mom and Dad’s inclination to be engaged with their only child.

We get where they are coming from, and we can relate, but the directors essentially use it as a leash, yanking us from one manipulative and contrived scene to the next using every tool at their easel – from cute baby images to fuzzy displays of affection.

It’s all so colourful and action-packed, it’s easy to lose yourself in the empty distraction of it all. But that’s just Storkholm Syndrome: when you regain your wits on your way out of the theatre, you’ll realize Storks didn’t fly at all.

@katherinemonk

THE EX-PRESS, September 23, 2016

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