The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (2012)

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!, which American distributors decided to rename Band of Misfits on the theory that their countrymen would not sit still for a long title, arrives from Aardman in 2012 with the studio's customary clay-stained craftsmanship. The Pirate Captain wants only to win Pirate of the Year, and his quest drags him through a Victorian London of haughty monarchs and hapless naturalists. The jokes land, the dodo named Polly is a fine comic engine, and the whole enterprise radiates an unfashionable good cheer.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a modest specimen. The voice cast includes Lenny Henry, Salma Hayek and Imelda Staunton, which lends the ensemble a pleasant variety without any announcement of intent. Queen Victoria rules as a dodo-devouring villain, and Cutlass Liz commands a ship of her own, though these are comic inventions, not arguments. A secret club of world leaders who dine on endangered species offers a faint jab at the powerful, delivered as slapstick. Charles Darwin appears as a lovelorn schemer with poor social instincts, which is characterization rather than diagnosis.

The film never stops to instruct. There is no sermon on the environment, no lesson on identity, no third-act speech about the way things ought to be. The leprosy joke in the trailer caused genuine offense and was quietly recut into a plague joke, which tells us more about the era's sensitivities than anything in the finished picture. What remains is a swashbuckling comedy that trusts its audience to laugh at a chimpanzee butler and a queen in a bad mood. The cultural markers are present only as faint watermarks. A pleasant afternoon, and nothing more.