The Pirates! Band of Misfits
{4.5/5} “Pirate of the Year is just… commercialized nonsense. Real pirating isn’t about trophies. It’s about fighting up staircases backwards. It’s about sliding down sails with a knife in your teeth. Beard glossiness!”
The Pirate Captain would like to win Pirate of the Year but the other pirate captains have once again managed to plunder more gold. His parrot is really a dodo, one of his men is really a woman, and the ships that they board really don’t have any gold. But he’s had some great adventures and his crew love him. Then he runs into Charles Darwin, who points out that the dodo could win a science competition — and untold riches.
The Pirates! Band of Misfits was released in 2012. It’s a combination of stop-motion animation and computer animation.
It’s in the vein of Pirates of the Caribbean where the pirates are sort of good guys.
It’s not a masterpiece like Chicken Run but it’s funny and clever.
The Pirate Captain and his crew are great characters, as is Queen Victoria.
Although there are plenty of high jinks for kids it’s also got jokes about evolution.
There’s some fun during the credits, so keep watching.
The fun music is by Theodore Shapiro (The Girl in the Park). It cleverly incorporates the “Rule Britannia” theme at a few points.
Hugh Grant (Cloud Atlas) voices the Pirate Captain.
The movie was directed by Peter Lord (Chicken Run) and Jeff Newitt (animator on movies like Flushed Away).