The Pirates! Band of Misfits Movie Review

Stop-motion animation seems to be a dying art. It used to be featured much more frequently; not all of them were targeted towards young audiences. Now we get family friendly films once a blue moon, but even then it seems like the medium is perpetuated primarily by Tim Burton. Nevertheless, we still received a great stop-motion animated film with The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012).

After years of humiliation and failed attempts to win the coveted Pirate of the Year Award, Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) and his oddball crew take on the most renowned pirates in the world in a race to pillage the most booty. In their efforts, they cross paths with the lovelorn scientist Charles Darwin (The Doctor David Tennant), who persuades the Captain that the crew’s prized “parrot,” Polly, could be the answer to the untold riches they are searching for. Their adventure takes them to Victorian London where they meet the notorious pirate-hating Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton). It soon unfolds that Darwin’s motives for helping the crew are not what they seem, and that the Queen has an evil hidden agenda of her own. The Pirate Captain must choose between basking in the glory of being crowned Pirate of the Year, or staying faithful to his trusted crew.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits has an all-star cast. In addition to the names mentioned above, there is also Martin Freeman, Anton Yelchin, Jeremy Pivin, Salma Hayek, Brian Blessed, and Brendan Gleeson. You couldn’t ask for a more diverse array of comical UK actors for this slapstick zany adventure.

The Pirates! was animated by the same stop-motion animation crew that did Chicken Run (2000) and the Wallace and Gromit movie The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005). The animation is phenomenal to say the least. The movement is smooth, seamless, and full of intricate subtleties and detail. Similar to Gromit in the Were-Rabbit film, there is also a character with no actual dialogue. Darwin’s “Man-Panzee” is so expressive that you can still tell what is going through the character’s mind without having the character verbalizing it. That just goes to show how well this movie was animated.

Something I thought was annoying in both Chicken Run and Were-Rabbit was the blatant vegetarian and animal rights themes in them. Vegetarianism and animal rights aren’t bad, but those films got rather preachy and beat you over the head with the concepts. The Pirates did not do that, thank goodness. In fact, the pirate crew regularly had “ham night” for dinner. It was not bashing vegetarianism, I’m just glad I wasn’t having a bunch of animal-rights-thumping pirates trying to convince me to eat tofu. That would have been incredibly stupid.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits is full of zany and joyfully silly gags. There are times it feels like an old Loony Tunes cartoon with some distinctive British wit. People are hit with frying pans, causing the frying pan to take on the shape of the person’s face. The face on a painting becomes goofy and distorted after being hit by a cannonball. Skidding tire sounds are made when the pirate ship makes sharp turns. There’s also more trap door gags than you can shake a stick at. I’d hazard a guess that adults who grew up with Loony Tunes will get a bigger kick out of this movie than kids will.

The story is pretty simple and doesn’t stand out as a stellar piece of writing. It feels pretty childish, but I think that’s what makes it so fun. It’s got a Saturday morning cartoon quality to it, but it has lots of gags that will fly over kids’ head and keep adults laughing. It also has simple enough plot for young viewers to understand and enough slapstick to keep them involved. This movie might appeal most to adult viewers who are fans of Monty Python or The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Just take it as it is; a silly, slapstick comedy that the whole family will enjoy.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits was certainly a fun movie. I enjoyed it and it kept me laughing throughout. This is a perfect movie for a family movie night. Kids will love it and adults will enjoy it, too. The number of animated characters moving about on the screen at one time was impressive enough; that is very complicated and difficult to achieve in stop-motion animation. But the detail beyond that is incredible to watch. I didn’t quite love it enough to want to buy a copy of it, but I imagine most families with young kids will want a copy of their own.

What is your favorite stop-motion animated film? Comment below and tell me why!

Fright Night

After feeling betrayed by Hollywood with their recent array of rubbish vampire movies, I wasn’t excited to see Fright Night (2011), a remake of a 1985 vampire horror movie by the same name. That is until I heard The Doctor David Tennant was in it. It instantly became a much higher priority. I don’t typically care for horror movies, but this one was actually really good!

High School senior Charlie Brewster (Anton Yelchin) finally has it all; he’s running with the popular crowd and dating the hottest girl in school, Amy (Imogen Poots). He’s become so cool he’s begun avoiding his old friend Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). Trouble arrives when an intriguing character named Jerry (Collin Farrell) moves in next door to Charlie. Jerry seems like a great guy at first, but there’s something not quite right about him, and only Ed and Charlie seem to notice. After witnessing some very strange activity, Charlie comes to an unmistakable conclusion: Jerry is a vampire preying on the neighborhood. Unable to convince anyone of the truth, Charlie has to find a way to get rid of the monster himself, even if that means enlisting the aid of a truly bizarre Las Vegas occult magician Peter Vincent (David Tennant).

One of the early scenes in Fright Night had a very paranoid Ed trying to convince Charlie that Jerry is a vampire. Charlie accuses Ed of reading too much Twilight. Reasonably so, Ed is offended by this, and argues that Twilight vampires are make-believe and really stupid. Not only was this hilarious, but it was communicating to the audience that the vampire in this film is not going to be the pansy, sparkly variety who knows what you’re feeling and wants to take you to the prom. THIS vampire is the way vampires are supposed to be: undead, demonic monsters from hell, bent of draining the life force of the innocent to sustain their existence as one of the damned. With all the romanticized and sexualized vampire movies, TV shows, and literature that has emerged in recent years, having a truly frightening monster out for blood was oddly quite refreshing! Besides, anything that makes fun of Twilight is good in my book.

I also have to give credit to a film that causes me to withdraw previous statements. I’ve said that horror and comedy are thematically at odds with each other and don’t fit well in the same movie together. Fright Night was a comedy horror movie, and it was a hoot! They argue that “Jerry” is a terrible name for a vampire, they complain about the quality of vampire hunting gear won on eBay, and Charlie’s mother (Toni Collette) makes references to the 1960’s TV show Dark Shadows.

Fight Night does horror really well, too. Since movies like Saw came out, the horror genre has degenerated from stories that induce feelings of horror and terror to stories that simply gross out the audience. There’s a big difference; getting a buzz saw blade lodged in your face is gross, holding your breath to try and remain undetected by a monster in its own lair is scary. There are scenes in Fright Night that filled me with dread while other scenes had me laughing.

Teens are the target audience for this movie. Most teen horror flicks feature characters that are intent on having sex, partying, experimenting with drugs, and underage drinking and the like. Fright Night was curiously much more conservative. The story focuses more on Charley’s changing relationship with Ed, rather than on Charley’s sexual interest in his girlfriend. On top of that, Charlie is trying to protect his single mother from making bad choices with bad boy next door. Charlie even becomes less interested in sex the more time he spends hunting down Jerry. The movie isn’t about sexual conquests of the adolescent male; it’s about Charlie making conscious choices to protect the women in his life from the “bad boys” out there. I don’t see this kind of thing in movies aimed at teens very often, it was a pleasant change of pace.

Fright Night is fairly clean for a horror movie. Since it’s a vampire movie, we get to see an abundance of blood splatter, but we don’t see much disembowelment and such. There’s some immodesty, but no full on nudity. There’s quite a bit of profanity, though, especially after the comically bitter and sarcastic Peter Vincent shows up. I didn’t care for that, but it fit into the character well, so I can’t really fault the movie for it.

Fright Night was a really fun comedy-horror movie, and the best contemporary vampire movie I’ve seen in years. It was fun, it had some good writing and directing, excellent actors, it was funny and scary, and had some great special effects and cinematography. Best of all, there are actual vampires in this vampire movie; it shows us, in a fresh and interesting way, the traditional vampires that people with any taste will know and love. Fright Night is worth seeing. I don’t even like horror movies that much and I enjoyed it enough to want a copy on Blu-Ray. Some content (such as the profanity) won’t settle well with some viewers, so be conscientious of that before seeing it.

What is your favorite Comedy-Horror movie? Why did you like it so much? Comment below and tell me all about it!