Though it seems that all other movies have been eclipsed by the record-breaking success of Marvel's The Avengers, there is one film which deserves much more attention than it has received: Aardman Productions/Sony's The Pirates! Band of Misfits. This grossly underrated stop-motion animated comedy exceeded all my expectations and opened me to the fast-wit piratical world of author Gideon Defoe's silly genius.
I have been a fan of most of Aardman Production's previous films, especially Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which utilize animator Nick Park's cheeky British slapstick style to create nonstop slews of one-liners and pie-in-the-face humor. The Pirates! Band of Misfits is no exception and in fact hones the jokes and the pacing to such precision that as soon as you're done laughing at one character's idiocy you find yourself being built up to the next guffaw.
The story of this nautical farce centers around The Pirate Captain (who has no other name) and his adoring yet wonderfully inept crew of brigadiers, each with their own names being descriptors of what they look like (i.e. The pirate with the scarf, the pirate with gout, the remarkably curvaceous pirate [a woman with a fake beard]). They set out on a haphazard mission to win The Pirate Captain the coveted prize of Pirate of the Year Award, while running afoul of Queen Victoria (who HATES pirates) and Charles Darwin who is after their pet dodo (which the pirates believe is just a 'big-boned' parrot).
Overall, the message is clear: life is fun and if you believe in yourself, even if everyone else thinks you're an idiot, everything will turn out okay. As the Pirate Captain remarks, "It's only impossible if you stop to think about it."
I was excited to learn after watching this film that it is based on a series of books by Gideon Defoe. I immediately went to the public library and checked out The Pirates! in an Adventure with Communists and found that the movie follows the source material impeccably, even helping the series a bit with giving me beautiful visual interpretations of the rambunctious pirates. Each novel is digest sized and around 150 pages which allows for an afternoon of hilarity, best when read aloud.
So, I implore you see the movie while it is still in theaters (which may not be much longer) or to at least read the novels while you wait for it to come out on DVD/Blu-ray. Aaarrr, you can't go wrong!
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