Welcome to The Morning After, where I share with you what I’ve seen over the past week either in film or television. On the film side, if I have written a full length review already, I will post a link to that review. Otherwise, I’ll give a brief snippet of my thoughts on the film with a full review to follow at some point later. For television shows, seasons and what not, I’ll post individual comments here about each of them as I see fit.

So, here is what I watched this past week:

The Pirates! Band of Misfits

Without Nick Park at the helm, it’s easy to see how much better a movie like this would have been with him. The story of a ragtag band of pirates whose captain longs to be named Pirate of the Year, embarks on a journey to try and capture the elusive award from three better and more experienced captains. A chance encounter with expeditionary Charles Darwin informs the captain that his precious parrot and beloved ship mascot Polly is in fact a long-extinct dodo bird. Darwin leads him to believe that his avian companion will garner him vast riches at a national science competition in London, so they head towards England where a pudgy and vile Queen Victoria, who abhors pirates, awaits.

The foreground adventure has many laughs, but it’s the background, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them gags that are more interesting (for example, the seal on the building for the Royal Society, the leading scientific organization in the city, says “playing god since 1660”). Yet, for the entirety of the film’s length, there’s a notable dearth of broad humor. Walking into an Aardman film, you shouldn’t expect very many obvious bits, but you end up with more than necessary and the remainder of the laughs are sparse enough to make for a challenging slog through the material. It’s been twelve years since Peter Lord stepped into the director’s chair and the last time was also one of Aardman’s weaker offerings, Chicken Run, which he worked on with Nick Park sharing directing duties.

Why is The Pirates missing much of what has made Aardman one of the top animation houses operating today? It’s hard to say. Even Pixar has had a misfire in its pipeline, so perhaps this is a hiccup in the process. However, their upcoming slate, without Wallace and Gromit to help them out, could prove further disappointing. Let’s just hope that having Sony Pictures Animation backing the projects isn’t part of the problem. After all, Sony is one of the worst animation houses out there today with only Fox managing to underperform it.