Logistics saves the day in animated “Storks”

Take your kid to see a PG-rated movie starring animated, talking animals, and the action is sure to take place in natural or residential settings like the Pleistocene epoch (“Ice Age”), a plastic brick city (“The Lego Movie”), the North Pole (“Happy Feet”), a New York apartment (“The Secret Life of Pets”), or a Toronto ice rink (“Inside Out”).

That streak came to an end on Sept. 23 when Warner Bros. Pictures released “Storks,” an 87-minute comedy adventure that is set in a cavernous warehouse run by a third party logistics provider (3PL) run by birds.

As everyone knows, storks have traditionally cornered the last-mile delivery market for human infants. But 18 years ago, an avian 3PL called Cornerstone decided to abandon that business model and devote its feathered, flapping delivery network to higher-margin parcels from a new client, an enormous online retailer called Corner Store Dot Com.

The movie opens with a flock of bustling package carriers whisking e-commerce purchases such as smartphones to customers impatiently awaiting curbside delivery… a scenario that will sound familiar to anyone who has worked in the logistics and fulfillment sectors in the past decade.

This pedestrian plot thickens when an ambitious stork named Junior (voiced by Andy Samberg) and an orphaned human named Tulip (voiced by Katie Crown) accidentally switch on the forgotten manufacturing line that produces living babies and have to make one last urgent, express delivery to get the kid to its loving family. Other voice actors include Kelsey Grammer, Jennifer Anniston, Jordan Peele, and Keegan-Michael Key.

In the chase scenes that follow, the animals flee through one supply chain milieu after another, from complex conveyors to towering gantry cranes, lift trucks, shipping containers, a maritime port, and a massive containership. As they struggle to deliver the baby—pun fully intended—they interact with a range of logistics equipment such as routing optimization computers, innovative cardboard packaging, and mobile e-commerce apps.

Toward the end of the action, our heroes even escape a kidnapping conundrum by turning to the magic of reverse logistics. You see, the greedy stork CEO Hunter had ordered his penguin henchmen to dress Junior as a baby and tie him to a chair, before Tulip arrived at the last minute and saved the day by… well, you’ve got to see it to believe it.