Why?
After four increasingly uninspired instalments of Pirates of the Caribbean, your appetite for booty-hunting buccaneers is sated, right? How wrong you aaaarrh! The genre is about to be reinvigorated by an alliance between two British institutions: Aardman Animation, the production house behind Wallace and Gromit, and Hugh Grant, the man behind a legion of floppy fringed ditherers.
Directed by Peter Lord, a veteran of Aardman’s Chicken Run and Flushed Away, and adapted by Gideon Defoe from his own wry, revisionist novella, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists is a 3-D animation featuring the voice of Grant as a bumbling pirate captain called, erm, the Pirate Captain, who is desperate to win the Pirate of the Year award, his only prize until now having been for “Best Anecdote About Squid”.
The sharp script is stuffed with slapstick and 19th and 21st-century gags, and Aardman’s claymation looks splendid in 3-D — all those tactile cutlasses and cannons leap from the screen. The supporting cast sparkles, too, with Martin Freeman as the incredulous first mate, David Tennant as a far-from-saintly Charles Darwin and Imelda Staunton as a Queen Victoria with idiosyncratic eating habits. It’s Aardman’s 40th birthday this year and this family-friendly romp is a rollicking way to celebrate.
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists is released on March 28
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What they say
Hugh Grant
“The script was bang in the epicentre of what I find funny; Jane Austen gags mixed up with slipping-over-on-squid gags.”
Gideon Defoe
“We have treated Charles Darwin with terrible disrespect. He deserves a lot better. But we’ve already made the movie, so there’s nothing we can do.”