My review for The Pirates! Band of Misfits will be posted momentarily, but before it goes live I wanted to post these photos of Aardman Animation hard at work on the film.
I love this stuff: people hard at work on these little characters on their miniature sets. It's essentially grown-ups playing with toys for endless hours. Oh, and there's some photography thrown in for good measure. This is old-fashioned moviemaking and it feels pure and real. I adore most stop-motion animation, but Pirates! really surprised me. I found myself thinking about its gags, its set pieces, its moments of spontaneous action. There was one sequence with several characters riding a bathtub down Charles Darwin's staircase. It reminded me a lot of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the minecart scene that used optical effects, miniatures and live actors working in harmony to achieve a nail-biting sequence of peril. Pirates! doesn't just use stop-motion, but also digital effects and other tools to create sequences with just as much suspense, and humor to boot. This is a terrific film, and one of my favorite features of 2012.
