Rating: ****/*****, or 8/10
If Aardman Animation's most recent
triumph The Pirates!: Band of Misfits in any way set
out to make a point, its release couldn't have come at a more
opportune moment. The current scandal involving the Spanish king Juan
Carlos hunting African Elephants purely for the fun of it, despite
his position as vice-president of the Spanish branch of the World
Wildlife Fund, bears a striking resemblance to certain events
portrayed in the film, namely the way the British Queen Victoria uses
her influence with the London Royal Society to procure dinner in the
shape of the most exotic animals possible for the annual meeting of a
dining club of heads of state that simply exists for the sake of
eating its way through the animal kingdom. Victoria's particular meal
of choice this year (that is, 1837) is a dodo, the last of its kind.
Problem is, this bird is the mascotte of a Pirate Captain and his
merry crew of oddball pirates, and they're not gonna let their
beloved pet get eaten without a fight. Add to this mix pirate and
scientist competitions, Charles Darwin and his “talking”
chimpanzee, and a vast array of increasingly colourful pirates and
here you have yet another wonderful recipe for Aardman's traditional
claymation (moving clay puppets a
tiny little bit for each frame to achieve the illusion of motion)
family entertainment, that will indeed manage to successfully
entertain every age group of any family.
In the first half of the Nineteenth
Century, a nameless Pirate Captain (voiced with audible pleasure by
Hugh Grant) and his band of equally nameless scoundrels –
ironically, the dodo is the only crew member with a real name:
considering the fairly naive pirates think she's just a big boned
parrot, it's Polly – , sail the Seven Seas in search of ships to
plunder and shiny booty to collect. Unfortunately, this crew, which
consists of characters like the Albino Pirate, the Pirate with Gout
and the Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate (i.e., a woman with a fake
beard lowering her voice), is not particularly good at it, which
their pesky pirate colleagues continue to remind them in many a
tavern ashore. When the poor Captain makes his entry into the Pirate
of the Year competition publicly known, he's met with ridicule by his
fellow rogues, including a trio of dastardly successful pirates, that
first appear in the movie with ever more absurd grand entrances,
which climaxes when a huge sperm whale jumps out of the ocean,
landing on a pier with its face against the local bar front door,
opening his giant mouth to release a wave of golden booty with the
third and final captain surfing down his tongue. With this kind of
hilarious gags this early in the film, the audience knows it's never
seen funnier pirates than the likes only Aardman could conceive.
His spirit untempered by the roaring
laughter of his fellow criminal commanders, the Pirate Captain sets
out on a wonderfully bizarre quest for anything of value to win him
the Award, but fails to find rich merchant ships at sea, instead
stumbling on increasingly silly vessels, such as naturist cruises,
ghost ships and plague boats (the latter was called a 'leper boat' in
the film's trailer, but this was apparently thought to be politically
incorrect: the resulting joke is still the same, so the damage is
luckily minimal when the leper's arm falls off). Just when all hope
seems lost, the brigands run into Charles Darwin's ship, freshly
returned from the Galapagos Isles with a cargo hold full of animal
body parts (like Baboon's kidneys) and exotic live specimens
(including a sad Baboon). For a pirate, such a collection is useless,
but Darwin, portrayed as a wonderfully nerdy posh scientist with the
typical condition of not being able to get a girlfriend (and voiced
by David Tennant, who also sounds like he enjoys this role quite a
lot), takes an unusual scientific interest in Polly, and in a funny
plot parallel, convinces the Captain to co-attend the London Royal
Society Scientist of the Year award ceremony (sneaking into the city
disguised as a girl scout), under the pretense of winning a handsome
fortune which would help his stature as a successful pirate.
Unfortunately, this gets him under the radar of every pirate's
nemesis, Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton adding yet another total
bitch character to her repertoire, and obviously loving it all the
way), who, for reasons mentioned above, also proves really fascinated
by the poor dodo.
All the typical whacky ingredients of a
good Aardman film, certain to appeal to almost every potential
demographic in the audience, are present. As was the case with
Chicken Run and the various Wallace & Gromit films
(both long and short), only the most grumpy, tired and worn out
negative nincompoops will not enjoy this flick with its full barrage
of witty jokes, zany characters and silly situations. As a bonus, we
get a fantastically detailed overall look to the film. Almost every
scene is cramped with little details, all the way to the closing of
the end credits, adding not only an authentic feel to the period part
of the story (the film after all makes use of actual historical
settings and characters, though bending them to its own comedic
purposes), but making the movie seem that much more alive: it almost
makes Aardman's previous movies look fairly bland by comparison. The
trouble is, there's just so much to see it's impossible to take it
all in, thus making a second viewing (preferably at home with the
option of freeze framing the picture to facilitate a closer
inspection) nigh obligatory, not that we would mind. The movie's
3D-effects, in themselves compulsory too for today's animated movies,
never take away from the vast level of detailing, but even help
making the whole setting feel that much more realistic (as they
should, considering the actual use of three-dimensional puppets
requires such realism more than computer animated environments do,
since they're not really there to begin with). With regard to the
look of the film, The Pirates!: Band of Misfits proves
to be Aardman's most
ambitious project yet, and the studio fully succeeds into making this
film's world feel vibrant and compelling.
The Pirates!: Band of Misfits is
only Aardman's fifth foray into the motion picture business, and the
third to apply its trademark use of claymation. Most importantly,
it's a return to form, and to Aardman's roots, since its previous two
films, Flushed Away
(2006) and last year's Arthur Christmas,
used computer animation, the currently dominant style of animation.
Though neither film was bad, both of them failed to really feel like
Aardman productions, even though the computer generated characters
much resembled the clay puppets that came before in overall look.
Aardman now returns to their original style, which rightfully won the
studio an Academy Award for the brilliant Wallace &
Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
in 2005. It proved the right choice, since the studio now clearly
sets itself off against the other animation studios like Pixar and
DreamWorks, which in recent years competed ever more aggressively for
audience and critics' attention (Pixar still ruling supreme,
certainly if the number of Oscars is taken into account) with their
fully digitally animated movies, by maintaining a more traditional
“old school” style of bringing life to inanimate characters (the
use of digital backgrounds notwithstanding, since it's still the
puppets that make the film come to life). It may very well win
Aardman a second Academy Award, which at the moment certainly seems
earned, though of course, in terms of animated films, the year has
only just begun. However, it fully feels like a dinner starting with
the tastiest course first. To stay in this metaphorical sense, let's
hope this wonderful claymation piece doesn't prove a dodo itself: we
could really use more ingenious alternatively animated movies like
this one, instead of seeing it swallowed by the more standardly animated fare.
And
watch the trailer here:
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