“MOMMY, where did I come from?” There are two answers. One is the truth, whether embellished or not by references to birds and bees. The other is a lie. The stork didn’t bring a baby.

Writer/director Nicholas Stoller has chosen to make a film about a big fat lie. Is that what you want your kids to know before the inevitable onset of puberty tells them that you’ve been lying since they learned to ask questions? If you have no shame, go ahead. When they first ask the question, tell them that the stork brought them.

Stoller pursues that falsehood in an animated film with few commendable qualities, from screenplay to technical values. It’s noisy, its voicing lacks style, its family values and portrayal of social customs exemplify American cultural hubris. The land of the free and home of the brave, with an obesity rate (33 per cent) higher than even Australia’s (26.8 per cent) and peanut paste contains molasses and sugar, compounds its campaign of random world cultural domination (the peanut paste reference is a personal bleat – I recently bought a jar and found it within spitting distance of disgusting!).

The sole recommendation I consider appropriate for “Storks” is that parents should deny it access to children of an age that might possibly believe that it tells the truth. It doesn’t.

At all cinemas