The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists – review

No comedy about pirates could be worse than Roman Polanski ’s Pirates , which got the 1986 Cannes festival off to a bad start, and none has yet been the equal of Robert Siodmak’s The Crimson Pirate , the high-tidemark of the genre. Based on the first of a series of children’s books by Gideon Defoe, this latest stop-action animated movie from the Aardman studio has a decent position between the two on the Plimsoll line. Hugh Grant provides a characteristically diffident voice for the hero, a cheerfully unsuccessful British buccaneer operating in the mid-19th-century Caribbean and urging his incompetent crew to support his bid to become Pirate of the Year. Seeking to destroy him is the young Queen Victoria (Imelda Staunton), a pirate-hater with considerable swashbuckling skills. Bent upon employing him for more peaceful adventures is a lovelorn Charles Darwin (David Tennant). The graphic work is charming, the voice casting excellent, and there’s a small part for the Elephant Man. Chuckles and smiles rather than plank-walking belly laughs are the order of the day.