The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! is a 2012 stop-motion film by Aardman Animations. It follows a hapless Pirate, captain of a ship, intent on winning the Pirate of the Year Award with the help of a young Charles Darwin and a pet parrot that is actually a rare dodo.

I just had to photograph the model at the exhibition at the Young V&A, and clean up the background to make it appear the ship is truly sailing on the seven seas.

The cabin at the stern reminds me of the galleon in the film Sinbad, the Sailor, a 1947 film starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as Sinbad and Sabu as his companion.

The scenes with the galleon bathed in moonlight with light from the candles in the rear cabin setting up the cosiness of the ship are as romantic as it gets.

Feathers McGraw

In case anybody is deceived, Feathers McGraw is a penguin. He stuck a rubber glove on his head and pretended to be a chicken. It is true that he managed to throw investigators off the scent, but in the end he was captured.

Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends

If you are in London, then you can visit the Young V&A to see the behind the scenes stuff the goes into Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit films and other films the Aardman team make.

It’s on until November, so there’s time to see it. The Young V&A is in the East End, and a five minute walk from Bethnal Green station on the Central Line.

Morph

Morph could do anything – roll himself into a ball, change himself into a teapot, and and back into Morph.

Until Tamara and I went to the exhibition – and it was Tamara who persuaded me to go – I thought that Tony Hart made Morph. After all, Tony Hart was an artist and it was he who introduced the Morph stop-motion cartoons on his Take Hart programme on TV.

But no, at the exhibition I found out that it was Peter Lord and David Sproxton who made Morph, and later they were joined by Nick Park, who dreamed up and drew Wallace and Gromit.

Creature Comforts

The animated series that broke boundaries was Creature Comforts. It was maybe a bit cruel, but it was funny. Nick Park gathered unscripted audio interviews with members of the public and then ‘translated’ the conversations to make it look like animals talking about everyday life.

Creature Comforts first appeared on TV in October 2003, but it appeared originally as an award-winning animated short film by Nick Park and Aardman Animations in 1989, a month before Wallace and Gromit appeared.

What made it satire were the very expressive characters of the animals. Just look at the character of the cat, with its hind leg parked casually on another leg while it expounds some great truth.

Update 28 August

I got an email from the V&A just now saying “Please note that due to industrial action, Young V&A, V&A East Museum and V&A East Storehouse will be closed on 4-5 September 2026. The exhibitions The Music is Black: A British Story, Inside Aardman: Wallace & Gromit and Friends and the David Bowie Centre will be closed”.

These are extras being prepped before they walk on for something that is being filmed. The street is around the corner from Abbey Road, which is down to the left and around the mini roundabout and the famous zebra crossing.

The man I asked said he was an extra. and that they were filming an advertisement. I gave him an old fashioned look and commented ‘not for the thirty trucks that were lined up and a Local Authority road closure’.

We agreed that they were prepped to say that and that was more than the ‘sorry, can’t say’ that they usually said.So it is a period film, and my guess is that is about the Beatles. Big deduction, huh!

The sun was low over to the left and it has cast a slight haze or bloom across the photos. When will I ever learn to put on a lens hood?

Cameras As Recording Instruments

This morning, a day after I went to see what there was to see, I looked again through the photos I took.

I found that one of the women in the shot was holding a copy of The Silver Book by Olivia Laing. The setting is Italy in 1974 in what is described as a period of political turmoil and the height of Italian cinema. The book was written in late 2024 and published in November, 2025.

The woman holding the book is dressed for the period, so she could be one of the extras. If the film is intended to be set in the period of the clothing then I guess it depends how much attention to detail the continuity people gave the props.

But there is another shot that shows more, and here below is the full frame and a crop.

So the film could be about the Beatles, and set in the relevant period.

Or it could be a science fiction film with a woman transported to the scene from 2026.

Or it could be a thriller set today, where people in period costume besiege the Abbey Road studios in a reflection of the political turmoil of 1970s Italy.

Or….

Or fill in with your preferred plot.

At the end, I have put another photo I took a little while ago showing a scene that you can see pretty much any day on Abbey Road at the crossing.