The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists

It’s a testament to the talents of Aardman Animations that they can take something as lame-sounding as “An Adventure with Scientists,” a surely dull expedition, and turn it into such jolly good fun (perhaps it’s this lameness that caused the film to be renamed the more appealing title of “Band of Misfits” in the States). Do not be mistaken, though, dear reader: Aardman’s newly released fifth full-length feature film revolves not around the eggheads of the science lab, but around the scallywags of the seven seas: that’s pirates, to you and me, and there’s plenty on display.

We have all sorts of pirates in “The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists,” most of whom are curiously identified merely by their physical attributes. We have The Pirate with a Scarf (Martin Freeman, “Nativity!”), The Pirate with Gout (Brendan Gleeson, “The Guard”), The Albino Pirate (Russell Tovey, “Being Human”) and also The Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate (Ashley Jensen, “Ugly Betty”), whose beard, I have to say, looks a bit suspect.

Most importantly of all, though, we have the pirate captain of this fine crew, namely the Pirate Captain, as voiced with terrific skill by rom-com darling Hugh Grant (“Love Actually”). Knowingly smug and lovably foolish, and brandishing a luxuriously bushy beard, the Pirate Captain sails the high seas in search of booty (treasure, I mean; this is a kids’ movie, remember) with no such luck, instead hopelessly hijacking ships that turn out to be inhabited by ghosts, lepers, school children and nudists (he does find some booty on that one, mind).

This certainly isn’t going to help him win the upcoming Pirate of the Year award he so yearns for, an accolade that’s usually handed to egocentric American pirate Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven, “Spy Kids: All the Time in the World”). However, when the Pirate Captain and his trusty crew stumble upon the ship of noted scientist Charles Darwin (David Tennant, “Fright Night”), an opportunity to finally snag the gong from Bellamy finally arises, which lands them in the hands of the pirate-loathing, viciously twisted Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”) in merry old England.

Having explored the techniques of computer animation in 2006’s “Flushed Away” and last year’s ”Arthur Christmas,” “The Pirates!” sees Aardman going back to the stop-motion, claymated routes they last showed (rather gloriously) in 2005‘s “Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit." With seafaring ships, rope-swinging action and sword-clanging battles, it’s undoubtedly their most elaborate and epically scaled production so far, and, shiver me timbers, they’ve pulled the whole thing off with absolutely nothing to fault.

Meticulously designed and painstakingly animated over the course of four years, this is the kind of animated film you’ll be looking at with your jaw on the deck in goggle-eyed bemusement over how on earth they did all this with little more than a bit of patience and a handful of Plasticine - they’ve certainly come a long way since the time a cracker-gnawing Englishman went to the moon with his canine companion to get some cheese.

Based on the first two books in the “Pirates!” series by British author Gideon Defoe (who also serves as the film’s writer), the film is very much a comedy, and very much a funny one. As is typical of Aardman’s beloved style, each scene is replete with balls-to-the-walls slapstick, sprinkled with a notably British sense of humour and littered with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it background gags, which shall surely prove rewarding come the irresistible repeat viewings. I suppose you could say that it’s got Aardman’s fingerprints all over it - literally.

But what really makes “Pirates!” work as well as it does is the unrelenting creativity that Defoe’s script provides time and time again. Clearly aware of how to please and amuse an audience of toddlers, teens, parents and grandparents all at the same time, Defoe writes with an invention and wit that calls to mind the works of Douglas Adams, all topped off with an inspired absurdity so brilliantly handled that scenes of a chimpanzee butler holding up illogically timely cue cards will pass by entirely unquestioned.

With director Peter Lord (“Chicken Run”) in tow and a sumptuous cast of supremely talented voice actors at hand, “The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists” is a barrel of laughs that’s as silly as a slapped fish and as refreshing as a swig of rum. At the very least, it’s certainly in much better shape than that increasingly pesky “Pirates of the Caribbean” nonsense; it looks like good ol’ Captain Jack’s got some fierce competition on his hands.

8/10