This is a really weird animation – weirder, perhaps, than it entirely intended to be – co-directed and written by Nicholas Stoller of Forgetting Sarah Marshall fame, and featuring the voices of Jennifer Aniston and Andy Samberg. It occasionally felt like a very hyperactive pitch: a wacky idea presented to studio executives by overcaffeinated writers, who’d thought it up in the corridor just before the meeting. The finished product brazens everything out with surreal chutzpah.
The idea is that babies really were delivered in little bundles via storks in ye olden days, until other, unspecified methods were popularised in modern times. So these storks threw themselves into a new service industry: delivering stuff that people have bought online. But then one day a lonely kid, whose work-obsessed parents are neglecting him, writes to Stork Central asking for a sibling. (So stork-baby-delivery sort of can happen in the modern world … which doesn’t quite mesh with the storks’ supposed hilarious obsolescence in this regard. But no matter.) Meanwhile, a lone human employed in Stork HQ – a baby accidentally left behind, like Will Ferrell’s Elf – takes it upon herself to deliver this baby, and causes chaos in so doing. Some wacky Tex Avery fun.
