The Age of Commercialism

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

Unfortunately, this 15-minute animated short film from 3 years ago does not only fail in making me want to be a pirate, but it also does not manage to get me interested in the animated full feature film about the pirates seen in here. The only good thing I can somehow say about it is that it's nice to see they got Brendan Gleeson, Martin Freeman, Hugh Grant and David Tennant in here to reprise their roles from the "real" movie. Unfortunately, the action in here is neither too interesting nor too funny to make this a really convincing watch. I also did not really like the animation style here. It looks the usual and there are Aardman films out there where I like it, but this is not among them. All in all , a fairly disappointing film and I can really only recommend it to huge fans of the movie, which I haven't seen. Maybe this is the reason why I cannot approve of this short film here. As a whole, thumbs down.

The trend with animated films since Pixar has been to produced short films with the same characters – either for a DVD release, to feature in cinemas with other films from the studio or in many cases, both. For many films this is a very welcome thing but not always and I must admit that for Pirates, as much as I liked the film, I didn't love it to the point where I was falling over myself for more. So having this short film on the DVD didn't do much for me other than make me curious.The film is in the style of a late night chat show where the Pirate Captain presents various pirate-related features and adverts; from cooking, beard-maintenance, the importance of treasure maps and other such topics are all covered here. The end result is an amusing short film but not one that really needed to be made other than the need for a short film to go with the film. This shows since it feels like a film in search of an idea rather than the other way around; the concept is decent enough but fragmented and as a result quite sporadic in terms of laughs. The voice cast has some good names in there as the film did but nobody is really used too well. Perhaps it didn't help that I wasn't massively in love with the main film, but to be this short film just felt like it needed to be made, not that it was really crying out to be.Amusing if you liked the film, but otherwise this is just a so-so short film despite the occasional decent laugh.