The latest feature to emerge from Britain’s Aardman Productions workshop, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, succeeds in spite of a faint but persistent sense of factory settings and finishes. Following their partnership with Sony Animation for last year’s computer animated Arthur Christmas, Aardman (whose co-founder, Peter Lord, directs here, along with Jeff Newitt) has returned to the stop-motion claymation that helped build the company name. It’s a strange thing, knowing that a movie was literally handmade and still feeling it is vulnerable to the glaze of mass-farmed entertainment.
The story, adapted from the first two installments of a children’s serial by Gideon Defoe (who also wrote the screenplay), is the first source of this feeling. It’s 1837, and we meet the garrulous Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant, dining on his dialogue with impeccable form) as he resolves to enter an annual Pirate of the Year contest somewhere in the West Indies. Pirate Captain leads a ship of holy fools, each one sillier and more plainly named than the next. There is The Albino Pirate (Anton Yelchin), The Pirate with Gout (Brendan Gleeson), and The Pirate with a Scarf (Martin Freeman), among others. Pirate Captain’s rivals are announced with fanfare: Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven), the brash American, Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek), the Jamaican cutthroat, and Peg Leg Hastings (Lenny Henry), the… peg legged one.
It’s all rather casual — not unengaging, exactly, but lacking a narrative energy all its own. Flashy introductions are made, but the set-up feels like that of a franchise coasting through its third or fourth installment. Pirate Captain cuts an inglorious figure—he lacks looting and pillaging chops but desperately seeks the validation of his co-pirates, who see him as something of a tragic clown. The Pirate with a Scarf plays ego-fluffer, insisting that real piracy isn’t…
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To dispatch with the pleasantries and get straight to the but: Arthur Christmas favors the late-century style of computer animation that turns characters into smooth, plasticky dirigibles, adding a Made-in-China cello-skin to faces and scenery alike and vacuum-sealing the works for maximum digital freshness. I’ve never cared for the look — if cartoons could be embalmed, that’s how I imagine they’d be — and in sharing a release weekend with a Muppets revival, the limits of Arthur’s CGI puppeteering seem even more stark. That is of course, until you consider almost everything outside of my but — which may well not be yours — which is to say the near-total mitigation of aesthetic bummers with an avalanche of charm, wit, and enlivening, highly oxygenated performances.
A collaboration between Sony animation and Britain’s Aardman productions (of Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, and Flushed Away fame), Arthur Christmas is a Grinch-style story of rekindled Christmas spirit told from inside Santa’s compound at the North Pole. At one end of the investment spectrum are Santa’s ebullient but highly errant progeny Arthur (James McAvoy) and a million or so obsessive elves, and at the other are Santa himself (Jim Broadbent), a glory hound who’s been phoning it in for years, and Santa’s number one son, Steve (Hugh Laurie), a technocrat who has “festivized” the entire world and broken toy delivery down into a joyless martial art. In the middle is Mrs. Claus (Imelda Staunton), the stealthy home executive who just wants everybody to get along, and out back in the polar…
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