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Aardman Studios is a British animation company known for its stop-motion  clay animation films, in particular, the Academy Award winning Wallace & Gromit, and the groundbreaking series Creature Comforts.  Its full length feature Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit also won an Academy Award for best animated feature.  The studio also produced the popular Chicken Run and Shaun the Sheep.  The studio’s first computer animated film, Arthur Christmas, is in theaters now.  Japanese animation studio Studio Ghibli animator Hayao Miyazaki, widely considered one of the best animators of all time, counts himself as a fan of the Aardman movies.

If you haven’t seen Aardman movies before, start with the three Wallace & Gromit shorts A Grand Day Out, The Wrong Trousers, and A Close Shave featuring a cheese loving British inventive chap named Wallace and his smart, loyal, and cynical dog Gromit.  The animation, and the quick speeds of certain segments, will have you wishing they’d throw CGI out the window.  Then try Creature Comforts, a half-hour television series that aired in both the UK and USA, where folks were interviewed off the street, then their voices were dubbed into farm and zoo animals.  The result was laugh-out-loud funny stuff.

Just released is the preview to the newest stop-motion, full-length film, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, and it looks to be as incredibly put together as the rest.  Just check out details like the use of stop-motion liquid in this trailer.  The boat whipping across water, actually made from Plasticine, looks both realistic and unreal.

And this film features a top-notch set of character actors that should be familiar to everyone.  The Pirates! Band of Misfits, stars Hugh Grant (Remains of the Day, Bridget Jones’ Diary) as Pirate Captain, Brendan Gleeson (28 Days Later, Beowulf, Harry Potter series) as Pirate with Gout, Jeremy Piven (PCU, Entourage, Cupid, Judgment Night) as Black Bellamy, Brian Blessed (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Flash Gordon, Henry V, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace) as Pirate King, Salma Hayek (Puss in Boots, Wild, Wild West, From Dusk Till Dawn) as Cutlass Liz, Martin Freeman (Sherlock, The Hobbit, Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead) as Pirate with Scarf, David Tennant (Doctor Who, Viva Blackpool, Harry Potter series) as Charles Darwin, and Imelda Staunton (Shakespeare in Love, Chicken Run, Peter’s Friends, Much Ado About Nothing, Harry Potter series) as Queen Victoria.

The film is based on the first two books of Gideon Defoe’s Pirates! series.  Pirates! has a March 28, 2012, release date.