Please do not be fooled. This is not a film by Nick Park, the genius animator and claymation specialist responsible for Wallace and Gromit. No, this quaint little movie about pirates was drawn from the first installment of Gideon Defoe’s series, The Pirates! in an adventure with Scientists and directed by Peter Lord (Park’s partner for Chicken Run). The facial expressions, gags and sentiment you’ll find very similar to Park’s work, though the whole thing falls a bit flat without Park’s visual creativity.

No discussion of moving clay in film is complete, however, without Ray Harryhausen, who pioneered stop-motion clay in the ’50s and ’60s with Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts. His incredible monsters inspired a whole generation of film directors and art departments to fear no spectacle on film.

In this new Pirates! film, Hugh Grant plays the Pirate Captain, a failure of a plunderer who is mocked and jeered at for thinking he could possibly enter the Pirate of the Year contest. He leaves dejected, but determined to launch a rampage on the high seas worthy of the title. In his fruitless endeavors to commandeer gold, he happens upon a young, beardless Charles Darwin, played by the 9th Doctor, timelord David Tennent. When Darwin viddies the Pirate Captain’s fat “parrot” Polly, he is astonished. “That’s no parrot,” he says. “It’s the last living Dodo!”

The rest of the film is spent trying to win the the Royal Society’s annual contest for Best Scientific Discovery. The captain and Charles win, but Queen Victoria wants the Dodo for her petting zoo (a secret society of aristocrats who feast on endangered animals).

A decent animated film. Bring your British-American dictionaries for some of the dialogue, and of course, as with any Aardman Animations production, watch closely the edges of the screen. That’s where most of the jokes take place.