TORONTO – The idea of a pirate more enthralled by his own luxuriant beard than the seafaring tradition of pillaging-and-plundering was too good for director Peter Lord to resist.
And so the animation veteran, best known for writing and directing the stop-motion classic “Chicken Run” and producing a series of Wallace and Gromit films, dove into “The Pirates! Band of Misfits” with unbridled zeal, resulting in what he calls the “most ambitious stop-frame film ever.”
“There’s kind of a bright-eyed innocence about their approach to life,” Lord says of his motley band of mariners.
“And that’s a good thing. We celebrate it in the film, I think. The captain says he enjoys (killing) but we never see him do it, I can’t imagine quite how it would work out if he did. He says he likes it but equally important to him is the hat, singing shanties and above all, the beard. The luxuriant beard is very, very dear to his heart.”
Hugh Grant stars as the vainglorious Pirate Captain, a buffoonish 19th century boss determined to win the captain of the year award, even though he’s hopeless at amassing stolen treasure.
His crew is similarly simple-minded and as such are only identified by their appearance: they include The Pirate with a Scarf played by Martin Freeman, The Pirate with Gout voiced by Brendan Gleeson and The Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate, played by Ashley Jensen.
Lord says he cast his favourite actors for the sprawling ensemble, which includes Imelda Staunton as a villainous Queen Victoria, David Tennant as a young Charles Darwin and Jeremy Piven as rival pirate Black Bellamy.
“The big one, Hugh Grant, was kind of a challenge because I wanted a star, I wanted a big leading man to own the screen,” Lord told a Toronto audience during a recent advance screening.
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“I watched ‘About a Boy’ particularly and thought he was magnificent, it’s such a funny film, but I’d never heard him, you know, running up steps three at a time, standing on the quarter deck and shouting orders to the crew. He’s not done that in his career at all, so that was a leap of faith, a leap of faith to know that he could find that.”
The swashbuckling story is drawn from the Gideon Defoe book “The Pirates! In An Adventure with Scientists.”
Lord notes the tale is awash with elements typically considered anathema to stop-motion filmmakers: crowd scenes and a rolling sea.
At first, he thought he would be forced to abandon his beloved puppets and animate the entire film.
“But in my heart of hearts I wanted to do it stop-motion because that’s what we do best and that’s what we love,” Lord said in an interview before the screening.
“This is a classic technique which has been around for nearly 100 years and that’s at the heart of what we do. And the reason I think it’s so good is because I think the audience can kind of understand it, it’s handmade, they can sense that it’s got all this intimate personal attention from the animator’s touch, a certain degree of spontaneity, all of that is classic.”
Still, new technology was a necessity, he admits.
Scenes involving water, smoke and large crowds could only be realized with the help of computer-generated images.
“As far as I’m concerned it’s stop-motion with CG enhancements,” he says.
Meanwhile, animators used a 3D printer to further speed up production.
Lord says the high-tech device allowed them to physically print out a range of mouth shapes that could be inserted into each puppet whenever they needed to speak or adopt a certain facial expression.
Hundreds of mouth shapes were first designed on a computer and then churned out with the 3D printer.
“We have a huge library of these mouths and we (would) choose the right one for the line of dialogue and it’s great,” said Lord, who brought along one of the Pirate Captain puppets to demonstrate.
“In the very, very old days, when I was a boy, you had one mouth and you re-sculpted every frame with sculpting tools…. Then the film would have taken a further three years at least, you know. And I believe in working as fast as you can in animation, which isn’t very fast, but as fast as you can because then you keep the energy level up and you keep the sort of focus up.”
One of the most detailed scenes pops up early on and takes place at a favourite watering hole for the pirates. Lord says the action-packed section took 18 months to craft – the same time it took to make the entire film.
“In the tavern there was the captain and four of his crew … and in the background there were I think 30 other pirates that were drinking, playing cards, having secret conversations,” he says, acknowledging that most of that action will go unnoticed by the audience.
“When you come back to view it on your Blu-ray for the 400th time you can in fact track little stories that are happening in the background characters.”
The incredible detail makes the film ideal for repeated viewings, says Lord.
Other blink-and-you’ll miss it nuggets include cameos by Jack the Ripper and an appearance by Wallace and Gromit.
If there’s a through-line to be found amid all of his films, Lord muses that it could be a disarming innocence that pervades his sweet-natured characters.
“Innocent people in a cynical world, those are my heroes,” says Lord. “And … the underdog, because underdogs are always good in stories.”
“The Pirates! Band of Misfits” opens Friday.
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