Pirates! So You Want To Be A Pirate

The Pirates! So You Want To Be A Pirate!  

Aardman’s latest big screen creation The Pirates! Band of Misfits is due to hit the home cinema market soon and as a precursor Aardman have released this mini movie featuring some of the characters from said film.  

The basic idea is that Pirate Captain (Hugh Grant) is hosting a chat show type thing (think Daily Show or Dave Letterman) that interviews a number of characters from the film and lets people know how they too can be Pirates! (with an exclamation mark, obviously).  

There’s not much to it and it only last 18 minutes but it’s still quite a good laugh and will be fine for the young audience it caters to and those who just love Aardman animations.  

There are a few extras on here that are quite good, the best being the Making Of for the main film – although not quite sure what that’s doing here as it belongs on the future release of the film itself rather than here, giving away a large portion of the plot and all.  

Two great extras, short but succinct, involve Aardman employees:  

How to animate your Pirate is a quick look at stop-motion animation done simply using some clay, a prop and a web cam with one of the Aardman animators.  

How to draw your Pirate is hosted by an Aardman artist and shows quite simply how to draw a pirate using simple technique/rules and then how to strike a pose using the same rules.

Both of the above are great for young kids to teach them that drawing and animation isn’t something to be afraid of and can be quite simple.  Practice leading to experience and then experimentation to more adventurous work.  I honestly wish I’d some lessons like this when a youngster, I’ve never had a natural drawing ability but something like this could well have set me off in those days – too late now though.  

There are also a couple of CD-ROM extras that will only be available for a limited time.  The first is the ability to print colouring pages and the other is How to talk like a Pirate.

Cheap and cheerful release that may just fill in the time prior to the main release...