¡Piratas! Una loca aventura

Patience is a virtue, a phrase that the folks at Aardman Animation studios will understand only too well. After endless accolades and praise it's easy to forget that the studio has produced only two stop motion animated films in the past 12 years.

Pirates have the best life when you think about it. The only rules they ever need to follow is the Pirate rule. Don't expect me to tell you land lover because even I make things up as I go when it comes to comedy. What we have here is the story of...

The leader of a band of well-meaning but inept buccaneers (voice by Hugh Grant) hopes to win the Pirate of the Year award, and his clumsy efforts lead to an improbable alliance with the young Charles Darwin (David Tennant)—while catching the evil eye...

In “The Pirates! Band of Misfits,” Hayek voices the most seductive of the 19th century scoundrels aiming to win Pirate of the Year, a prize awarded to whoever collects the most booty. Since the film comes from Aardman Animation (the British studio...

“The Pirates! Band of Misfits” is created by Aardman Animation, the same company that does “Wallace & Gromit,” so the stop-motion animation is incredible. Considering the animation is painstakingly done frame-by-frame, the detail and movements are...

Pirate Captain (voiced by Hugh Grant) takes his crew on a mission to win the Pirate of the Year Award over his rivals Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek) and Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven). On their quest, the inept band teams up with Charles Darwin...

If Captain Jack Sparrow, even with all of his treachery and rum-imbibing, threatened to turn pirates cuddly and innocuous, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, the new stop-motion feature from Aardman Animation, makes them even more potentially adorable...

Anyone who knows my taste in movies or is familiar with my reviews knows that I am a huge fan of animated films. They routine occupy slots in my Top 10 list of the year, and I was actually somewhat disappointed in 2011 when the animated features didn’t...

All these familiar flavors are again front and center in The Pirates! Band Of Misfits, the feature that returns Aardman to theatrical stop-motion after the CGI of Arthur Christmas and Flushed Away. It also returns Aardman co-founder Peter Lord to the...

Maniacally inventive and tightly packed, if not overpacked, "The Pirates! Band of Misfits" comes from the Aardman animation folks behind "Wallace & Gromit," "Chicken Run" and, more recently, "Arthur Christmas." Their latest may be easier to admire than...

It’s hard to imagine a kids’ movie in which the hero could wax nostalgic about “running people through” — as in, with a sword — and make it sound kind of . . . adorable. But then, Pirate Captain (both his name and his title) is played by Hugh Grant.

Great Claymation, like the kind in this adventure from the legendary Aardman studios (Wallace & Gromit), still radiates a warmth that no mind-bending number of pixels can match. You can almost smell the brine in the boat helmed by Pirate Captain...

The gang at Aardman Animations, producers of the whimsical and wonderful "Wallace & Gromit" films, have turned to the high seas for their next animated tale, "The Pirates! Band of Misfits." This tale of a pirate and his motley crew is the company's...

The Pirates! Aardman returns to hand-crafted clay-mation for this riotous seafaring romp. The film is almost too crowded with witty visual and verbal gags to catch on a single viewing. Although it's also too corny to be a real classic.

Awash with jollity and drollery in equal measure, Gideon Defoe’s Pirates! book series was sailor-made for Aardman Studio’s brand of sophisticated, stop-motion silliness.

Another Aardman triumph. The animation house’s most technically ambitious project so far and, if not quite at the genius level of Wallace & Gromit, still a comedy treasure and far too good just for kids.

Movies like the ‘Shrek’ series have largely devalued the idea of a film aimed at both children and parents, but ‘The Pirates!’ gets the balance spot on. Kids will be enthralled by all the action, slapstick and yo-ho-ho-ing while the olds will get...

Aardman Animations have a deserved reputation for excellence. Pretty much everyone in the world loves the Wallace and Grommit short films; a lot of people loved the Wallace and Grommit feature, Curse of the WereRabbit, and here's plenty of fans of...

Though we’d love to see how Aardman handle Defoe’s followup, An Adventure With Communists, this amiable but overstretched diversion is unlikely to spawn a Caribbean franchise.