The Pirates! Band of Misfits is a very strangely titled animated movie from Aardman Entertainment (they of Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit), starring Hugh Grant, Martin Freeman, Imelda Staunton, David Tennant, Jeremy Piven, and Selma Hayek.
In Victorian times, Queen Vic (Staunton) has basically conquered the globe except for the West Indies, still very much the territory of pirates. That sentence alone should tell you how closely we're following reality, here.
One crew of pirates, led by the Pirate Captain (Grant), who presumably actually had a name at one point, is fully loyal but not especially effective. The Captain takes it into his head to win the coveted Pirate of the Year award, which asks about shanties and beards, but ultimately comes down to whoever has the most booty. Constantly overshadowed by flashier pirates, the Captain eventually boards a scientific ship run by Charles Darwin (Tennant), who immediately realizes that the Captain's fat parrot is in fact a dodo, supposedly extinct. Darwin really just wants to get in good with Queen Vic (with whom he's kind of obsessed), and convinces the Captain to present the Dodo at the Scientist of the Year awards. He does, disguised as the Scientist Captain, and wins, but then sells the dodo to the queen in order to win the Pirate award, everything falls apart spectacularly, turns out the queen wants to eat the dodo, but the Captain wins back his crew's loyalty and all is well.
So, this movie is based on a book series, and was released in the UK as The Pirates! An Adventure with Scientists!, which is much more indicative of what's actually in the movie. The reason for the change varies by who you talk to, but the thinking basically boils down to "Americans won't get it," which, like, they didn't, because the movie didn't make enough internationally to demand a sequel.
Knowing that the studio changed things to make it appeal to Americans make a lot more sense, actually. There are some pretty British things going on. Just the casual murder that happens (Hayek's character happily stabs dudes for no reason, and they actually die, rather than getting up cartoonishly) isn't something you tend to see in USian animated films. The story overall is pretty basic, and I'm not sure how well the trope of the pirates not having names really works. The Captain has some personality, but the other pirates, including Martin Freeman's put-upon Number Two (credited as "the Pirate that Wears a Scarf"), wind up feeling a little samey. But for all that, the camaraderie of the crew is fun, the jokes mostly land, and the monkey butler is pretty clever.
My Grade: B
Rewatch Value: Medium-high
Next up: Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl
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