The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! Jeremy Piven, Salma Hayek, Lenny Henry and Brian Blessed. The film is loosely based on "The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists", the first book from Gideon Defoe's "The Pirates!" series. It follows The Pirate Captain and his crew of amateur pirates in their attempt to win the Pirate of the Year competition. "The Pirates!" is the fifth feature film by Aardman Animations, and its first stop-motion animated feature since "" in 2005, and Aardman's first stop-motion clay animated film released in 3D and shot in 2.35:1 widescreen. The film received positive reviews, while it was a modest box office
The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! may not quite scale Aardman's customary delirious heights, but "The Pirates!" still represents some of the smartest, most skillfully animated fare that modern cinema has to offer." Metacritic, which assigns a weighted average score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, gives the film a score of 73 based on 31 reviews. By August 2011, Aardman had been already working on a sequel idea, and by June 2012, a story had been prepared, awaiting Sony to back the project. Eventually, Sony decided not to support the project due to insufficient international earnings. According to Lord, "it got close, but