Shiver me timbers, pieces of eight and yah me hearties - the Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) is the most beloved pirate captain by all his crew: The Pirate With A Scarf (Martin Freeman), The Surprisingly Curvaecious Pirate (Ashley Jensen), The Pirate With Gout (Brendan Gleeson), etc. But sadly the love is not felt throughout the pirate realm; in fact, the Pirate Captain is something of a laughing stock. So he and his crew go out to search for booty; their search finds them meeting a rather lovesick Charles Darwin (David Tennant) and coming face to face with their arch nemesis, Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton)...
If there was one studio who could pull off bringing Gideo Defoe's very funny series of books onto the big screen, it's Aardman. The studio who brought us Wallace And Gromit and Chicken Run have a sense of humour that matches the franchise perfectly, their love of sight gags and odd British humour combining brilliantly. Interestingly, they had originally pitched the idea as CGI, until they fell in love with the prototype sets they built.
This is one of the triumphs of the film; claymation is, sadly, a very rarely seen art, which adds to the sheer spectacle of the movie. So many animated films are CG now it might have struggled to stand out from the crowd- one thinks of their other attempts, Flushed Away and Arthur Christmas for example, good films but not ones that immediately spring to mind when you think of Aardman. The size of the film, the constantly strict attention to detail in everything is a winning formula that they tirelessly push to pursue.
Grant plays the Pirate Captain to perfection, allowing his trademark poshness to deepen and occasionally snarl; he's obviously having a lot of fun. The same applies to all the cast, not least Tennant, whose Darwin has to compete with Mr Bobo, a silent Monkey butler who gets the biggest laughs of the film, and Staunton, whose Queen Victoria is a brilliant mixture of Delores Umbridge and Mrs Tweedy, Aardman's other great villainess.
Sadly, there are a few who are wasted; you feel as if not enough time is spent in the presence of the other pirates, particularly Salma Hayek's Cutlass Liz in such a male dominated film, despite Staunton's presence. Brian Blessed makes a winning cameo as the Pirate King, but again could possibly have appeared one more time.
The script by Defoe, though full of fantastic one-liners for the Pirate Captain and others, also occasionally feels rushed, but maybe that's the point. It never feels long; in fact, it could have even been slightly longer. The script is also surprisingly dark for Aardman, though admittedly a lot of their brilliant short films have an edge to them; still it's actually a refreshing thing to see, Aardman not talking down to their audience at all and still remembering that the majority of the people who have read the books will be older readers.
Though it does not quite match the sheer brilliance of Wallace And Gromit, The Pirates...is still a winning, funny, brilliantly animated film with just the right sense of humour to poke fun at itself, and makes you wish, surprisingly, that Grant were given more chances to shine as much as he does here.
8/10
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