Nicholas Stoller has established himself as one of Hollywood’s most successful comic filmmakers – and also has one of its most unusual career arcs.
He’s veered between making hard-R comedies such as “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” and the Seth Rogen “Neighbors” movies, and helming the return of the Muppets to the big screen in 2011.
“It becomes a love letter to parenthood and family.”
But his newest film, “Storks,” is his most personal one yet.
The Warner Brothers cartoon follows the story of a stork named Junior, who teams up with a human girl named Tulip and an array of other animals to deliver a baby to its new family when the Baby Factory is accidentally activated on his watch, producing an unauthorized little girl.
The baby delivery order is a surprise because in the movie, storks no longer deliver babies — they instead work for Cornerstone.com, a giant Amazon-style corporation that delivers just about everything else under the sun.
The movie also follows the story of a lonely little boy named Nate who wants a little brother with ninja skills, and his parents’ efforts to spend time with him by letting him redesign their home into a kids’ fantasy house while he waits for a sibling to come.
The movie is an unabashed portrait of babies and the joy they bring into other peoples’ lives. Kelsey Grammer, a staunch conservative who plays a key voice role in the film, said that he agreed to take on the movie “because it’s a real celebration of life.” Yet its unique teaming of characters is also a metaphor for the many ways families can be defined in current society.
The two main threads of the movie were conceived of and woven together by Stoller after he was inspired by his and his wife’s own difficult process in having a second child.
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“All the movies I’ve directed are really close to me emotionally,” said Stoller, discussing the movie with LifeZette at the press junket for the film.
“My first child was really easy for my wife to have her, and the second was very hard to have, since we had lots of fertility treatments and IVF, and it made me appreciate my first child in a way I hadn’t before. The emotional component of this is super buried at this point, but it started with the struggles my wife and I had to have our second kid. It becomes a love letter to parenthood and family.”
The movie’s underlying secondary theme of what makes a family had special appeal to Stephen Kramer Glickman, a veteran stand-up comedian and TV actor (he played the boy-band manager Gustavo Roque on the long-running Nickelodeon sitcom “Big Time Rush”), making his feature-film debut as the voice of the movie’s villain, Pigeon Toady. He appreciated the story of how Junior and his human friend Tulip ultimately find a family to belong to, while trying to place the baby in the right home.
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“I really felt like watching it, it’s all about finding out what makes you tick, and what is important to you as a human being, or as a bird, following through with that and not trying to ignore your instincts,” said Glickman.
“But I really feel that this is a movie about the different forms family takes, and be open to how that has evolved over time and that it’s not just mother-father-son-daughter. Sometimes your friends are your family, sometimes there’s different ways a family can exist. The movie does a really solid job in bringing that message to the screen in a really heartwarming, sweet way.”
Indeed, Stoller says he wanted to spotlight the strong emotions tied to the parents of Nate spending time with their son, even as they’re uncertain if they’ll be able to provide him with a sibling – a storyline that symbolized his own struggles to have a second child. He also used the idea of the world no longer needing storks to deliver babies as a metaphor for the fact that there are so many ways to have a child in the modern world.
Ultimately, his most important goal was to “cast a big net” and make “Storks” relevant to even those people who don’t have or want to have kids.
“I have a friend, a woman who’s not married, doesn’t want kids, but she’s part of eight families, and this movie speaks to someone like that as well as someone with eight kids too,” said Stoller.
“Anyone will see the movie through the lens of their own experience. I like to make movies that are about something. This is a celebration of family in whatever form you want. It’s about the need to be matched with a family we understand.”
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