The Stork Market

The first half of The Stork Market is just adorable--it'll have you either cooing with glee or gagging on the syrupy silliness. Being a dopey girl myself, I truly enjoyed watching storks deliver various baby animals in cartoonily creative ways. Sadly though, the second half of the cartoon is just your average sing along cartoon, and Pretty Baby isn't a terribly thrilling song to sing along to.

Have found a lot to admire about much of Famous Studios' earlier work and while the Noveltoons series is an uneven one it is worthwhile with some very good and even great cartoons when the studio was at its peak. Their best decade being easily the 40s, then by the mid-late-50s it started to feel like a different studio and not for the better. That is not to say that every 40s Noveltoons cartoon was good, there were lacklustre ones, including the worst of the very hit and miss Screen Song series

Of which 'The Stork Market' is one of the below average ones, speaking as someone that generally found the Screen Songs a mixed bag. It is also an example of not every 40s cartoon from Famous Studios or of their Noveltoons series being good. If anyone likes good animation and music with moments of charm, 'The Stork Market' has a little appeal. For anybody wanting anything resembling a story or any funny material with moments of freshness, it's probably best looking elsewhere.

It's the animation and the orchestral music that save 'The Stork Market'. Especially the latter, which was consistently of a high standard throughout the studio's run even in lesser efforts. The orchestration has a lot of energy and there are some truly luscious sounds throughout. The animation was not as consistent for the studio overall, with the quality declining when the studio did but throughout the 40s to mid-50s it was a strength. As one can tell, to me it was one of the compensations here, nice colours and the attention to detail in the backgrounds was admirable (also fitting the material and the song arrangements beautifully).

There are a few sweet moments and a couple of too far and between very mildly amusing ones, all early on.

However 'The Stork Market' does suffer from a very weak story, even though one doesn't expect a story that blows the mind not people would expect to find some so non-existent and little more than a stringing along of excessively sugary sweet scenes and predictable material. The gags are nowhere enough and the few that were pretty much were stale and old well before this was produced, a couple amuse slightly early on but generally they were not funny and tended to be too cute.

Found the cartoon quite repetitive as well and none of the characters are interesting or appealing. Instead very bland and like the cartoon was trying too hard to make them cute. It is very low on energy, especially in the singalong portion where 'The Stork Market' completely runs out of gas, and if one likes to have two sugars in their tea watching 'The Stork Market' was like having twelve, that's how over sweet it was to the point of being sickly. Do agree too that "Pretty Baby" is not one of the series' better songs, too gooey and got repetitive.

All in all, pretty lacklustre. 4/10.