While
Aardman’s latest feature film is a definite hit and a good, solid film, it falls
a little short of brilliance by lacking a little vital spark of warmth and
heart. Really, though, these are problems not with Aardman but with the source
material.
A
lively but inept pirate crew love their captain. However, he’s destined for
embarrassment when he sets his sights on the Pirate of the Year award, which is
based on how much booty each captain brings in. However, a chance encounter
with a young Charles Darwin reveals that not is all as it seems with the ship’s
parrot, and a harebrained scheme to get rich on a scientific prize is formed.
However, lurking in the shadows is the dastardly Queen Victoria – who loathes
pirates.
Pirates
are of course a firm favourite with kids and show up everywhere in animation,
from old adaptations of Treasure Island to One Piece. Pirates of the Caribbean is one of the biggest movie
successes of our times and there are ever more stories about space pirates,
steampunk pirates and fantasy pirates. The themes are nice and broad, there
will always be motivations for every character and yet the violence is always
on the cartoonish side. You’re on safe ground with pirates.
And
Aardman are nothing if not masters of the little touches. This film is a
rapidfire succession of brilliant visual gags and jokes – in three successive
shots, there’s a joke about the coin slots on pool tables (to get cannonballs
out), a joke about bowling alleys (as the cannonballs appear) and a joke about
when dogs put their heads out of car windows. There is lots of very British
silliness (how many outside these fair lands recognise that Blue Peter badge?)
and the dialogue and characterisation has the air of a pantomime. The plot is
simple but funny, with Polly just skirting being called a MacGuffin, and the
voice acting is superb – Hugh Grant and David Tennant play off one another
expertly and without ever drawing attention to themselves as actors, so that
it’s easy to forget they are not simply the clay characters on the screen.
Cameos from Lenny Henry, Salma Hayek and especially Brian Blessed are a hoot,
and the main crew have an excellent dynamic. Imelda Staunton’s voice couples
with a simply brilliant model to make a perfect villain who can look both
threatening and hilarious depending on the situation.
The
main issues I have are very small, but build up to keep the pirates all at
arm’s length. One is the book’s notion that the crew should all lack names. So
we get The Pirate Captain, the Pirate with Gout, the Albino Pirate and the
Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate (who is of course in the Mary Read vein). It all
gets a bit laboured and strained and reminds the audience constantly that these
are cardboard figures, and awesome scenes about ham can only go so far to
redress that. Then there is the way so much of the humour revolves around
hurting random stranger by dropping anchors on them and suchlike. Plus making a
plot point of ‘Mallet space’ (here, in a luxuriant beard), again preventing the
audience forgetting they are watching animation. Finally, I just don’t think
the monkey talking through cards in his hand works. It never raises more than a
vague smile and isn’t worth the cost in believability. Obviously, these are all
individually minor matters and I don’t think that what Pirates! really
needed was to be terribly realistic – but the little niggles as I said
prevented me from ever really relating to any of the crew, and thus about
really caring about any of them. Even the most emotionally accessible member of
the crew was known only as ‘Number 2’ or ‘The Pirate with a Scarf’.
This
is not to say this isn’t an excellent animated film. It is. I just know Aardman
can do much better, and want to see them make something that will touch people,
not just tickle at their funny bones.
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