Film review: The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists (U)

ONCE upon a time pirate movies were regarded as cinema’s black spot – unlucky things which did not prosper at the box office.

Pirates Of The Caribbean has changed all that, and these days the seagoing robdogs seem to be as particular with their projects as Robert De Niro.

However, The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists is a claymation-styled tale of salty seadogs that is rather sweet. Aardman Animations spent five years adapting Gideon Defoe’s book about inept buccaneers and their beloved Pirate Captain (vigorously voiced by Hugh Grant), whose incompetent attempts to board and raid ships land him on a teaching ship, a plague ship and a ghost ship, and who hasn’t won any piratical awards except for runner-up in Best Anecdote About A Squid.

The prize he really covets is Pirate of the Year, but that requires a lot of booty if he’s going to wow them at the ceremony on Blood Island.

There’s plenty for landlubbers to rubberneck in this energetically animated kids’ feature. You’ll catch the Blue Peter badge attached to a pirate hat the first time round, and maybe spot the golf sale man in the background of Victorian London, holding his billboard, but the film is rich enough to reward second and third viewings.

The jokes? Not so much. The Pirates! is gentle stuff, more likely to provoke smiles rather than hilarity. Mind you, I did enjoy David Tennant as Charles Darwin, with domed forehead, a monkey butler but no Mrs Darwin, who uses his daily journal to confide “I’m so unhappy. I wish I had a girlfriend.”

Charles Darwin? He’s the scientist of the title, although there are other famous name-drops including Jane Austen and, most remarkably, Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton). If you ever doubted Queen Victoria’s feelings towards pirates, look no further than her family crest in this movie, which includes the motto “I hate pirates.”

The tone is one of playful anarchy – none of the pirates has a name like Long John or Blackbeard. Instead they address each other by their chief distinguishing feature, such as the Pirate Captain’s loyal number two, Pirate with Scarf (Martin Freeman), the understandably irascible Pirate with Gout (voiced by Brendan Gleeson) and the enigmatic Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate (Ashley Jensen, adopting a variety of pitches and a detachable beard). There’s also the Captain’s dozy parrot, who attracts the attention of Charles Darwin, when he realises she could make him a fortune, since she is actually the world’s last dodo.

Congenial and unpretentious, the storytelling could be tangier, but it isn’t a bad bet for kids. Alas, it is being released in 3D, currently the film industry’s preferred method of high seas robbery.

Rating: ***

On general release