The Pirates! Band of Misfits

I regret to say that I have not seen a full cartoon of "Wallace and Gromit" or their Oscar winning feature film in its entirety but from what I have seen, they are the Shrek and Donkey of Aardman Studios. Nick Park, their creator, and Peter Lord are the founders of Aardman and both directed "Chicken Run" in 2000 which was the studio's first full-length feature. That movie had a great central idea, wonderful characters and an entertaining story. Peter Lord's "The Pirates: Band of Misfits" unfortunately has a ho-hum story with mostly flat characters. That seems to tell me that Nick Park is the heart of Aardman but that may be jumping to a conclusion. Nevertheless, I came out of the theater a little let down and there are a variety of reasons.

The story of this movie was not as exciting as "Chicken Run". One could argue that an escape movie is always better than an underdog story but I don't believe that. I feel that the story of "Pirates" had potential because sometimes, a story is designed to feature great characters and this ends up making the story better than it actually is. Such is the case with "The Simpsons Movie" and "The Muppets". The problem with "Pirates" is that the characters were not developed very well. I could not relate to them because they did not seem genuine enough. Aardman has given us great characters in the past so what went wrong? A clue could be the Pirate Captain himself because I felt that Hugh Grant's voice did not match his character at all. Also, it seemed very lazy to call the main character by such a name. This is why it was so hard to relate to him. This was my first movie of actor Martin Freeman's but "The Hobbit" was my official cinematic introduction to his work. One fun character in this show was Cutlass thanks to Salma Hayek's performance but the best character in the whole film was Queen Victoria as voiced by Imelda Staunton (a.k.a. Dolores Umbridge from "Harry Potter" and Bunty from "Chicken Run"). The animation of her character was also really good. I liked every scene she was in. Another fun character was Mr. Bobo and his cue cards. My favorite moments of his were "Dum, dum, dummmm" and playing music during the Captain Pirate's presentation of Polly. It was also nice to have Brian Blessed, Brendan Gleeson and Anton Yelchin in "Pirates". I liked how Blessed's character, the Pirate King, is dressed like Elvis. As you can see, the film has some good characters but they are quite secondary. None of the Pirate Captain's crew felt genuine enough to create full entertainment potential.

The use of visual effects was well done because they blended with the stop-motion animation quite well. Unfortunately, the main characters in this show failed at connecting with the audience and so the mediocre story was left to fend for itself. I was a little surprized when it was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars.

3 Stars