Movie Review: Storks

There are times when doing a job seems like it's too tough and not worth it. I feel that way a lot, even though I sometimes don't have a good reason to. It would be easier for me to just stay in my room all the time and not worry about everything else in the world. This weeks movie, Storks, touches on that theme when the storks go from delivering babies to household goods. Is taking the easy route the better way to go?

The movie starts with a narration by Junior (voiced by Andy Samberg), telling us the history of Storks, which can be seen in the trailer below. For as long as time Storks have delivered babies. No matter what happened to them, they had to deliver. As we watch the stork get tortured and beaten up trying to deliver the babies, we end on a still of one crazy situation. Well thank goodness they don't do that any more, because they now deliver packages for Cornerstore.com.

Junior is then seen flying through the store, celebrating his one millionth delivery. Everything seems to be going great, although no one seems to want to celebrate with him. They give him excuses, but he shrugs it off. He gets nervous when he is called to the boss office. This is when we meet the boss Hunter (Voiced by Kelsey Grammer) who informs Junior that he is up for a big promotion. Junior is really excited until Hunter informs he has will have to fire the orphan Tulip (voiced by Katie Crown).

The movie had a plot that gave time for them to develop the characters and that was nice, but it also lead to a lot of almost wasted scenes that dragged on a little too long. It did have a few surprise twists throughout the movie that was fun to watch, but then became generic at the end. I almost wish they had done a different ending than what they chose. You can tell they are trying hard to compete with top animation creators like Pixar and Dreamworks, but missed the mark. The motion animation was okay and was not too hard to watch.

The voice acting was fun, but I have to say a lot of the jokes given seemed a little forced, and it was a little distracting at times. I wonder if the movie would have done better with some improvisations from the actors to give the animators something more to work with. Makes me wish Robin Williams was around to show them how to bring a character to life, like how he did with the Genie in Aladdin. It was more enjoyable to watch this movie than Norm of the North, so they get a big thumbs up from me there.

Overall, it was an enjoyable movie to watch, but not up to top level tier. Kids might get a little lost in the middle, but they will have fun with the characters. And for these reasons I would rate this movie 6.6/10.