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The animated "Storks" delivers a happy surprise: a cartoon that starts with a clever premise and plays it through with well-executed humor.
Storks, this movie tells us, no longer deliver babies but make a tidy profit shipping packages for an Amazon-like e-tailer. The ambitious stork Junior (voiced by Andy Samberg) is being groomed to succeed the CEO, Hunter (voiced by Kelsey Grammer) — but to prove his worth, he must fire Tulip (voiced by Katie Crown), a human teen left behind when storks stopped delivering babies. When Tulip accidentally fires up the abandoned babymaking factory, she and an injured Junior must deliver the baby to be a sibling to only child Nate (voiced by Anton Starkman).
Directors Nicholas Stoller ("Neighbors") and Doug Sweetland (a former Pixar animator), working off of Stoller's rapid-fire script, set up inventive gags featuring a determined wolfpack, a baby-obsessed stork (voiced by Danny Trejo) and birds' innate inability to see glass. And, as a bonus, "Storks" has the cutest animated babies you've ever seen, so moviegoers will go "awww" as often as they chuckle.
'Storks'
Opens Friday, Sept. 23, at theaters everywhere; rated PG for mild action and some thematic elements; 87 minutes.