But what can be discussed is the game-changing rapid prototyping that's become an industry standard since Coraline: Replaceable puppet mouths along with heads are made by an in-house department at Aardman. These are computer designed and printed in resin (complete with teeth and tongue) via a 3D printer. Thus, the animators make the characters speak by using mouth replacements that are attached to the head by magnets. More than 6,818 puppet mouths were created for "The Pirates," including 1,364 for the Pirate Captain (voiced by Hugh Grant) alone.

A tray of resin mouths for the Pirate with a Scarf.

"Obviously, it's a very different look than Wallace & Gromit," Lord adds. "With pirates they need gold braid, belts, buckles, sashes, scabbards, lace. And you couldn't do that in clay or anything like it. So I didn't try to pretend that it was clay. I went for a different aesthetic entirely."

Indeed, rapid prototyping has been a godsend for the animators. "We tried this new approach, which was to make resin," explains animator Ian Whitlock. "With the sheer number of characters in this film and the fact that they're more detailed, it was far easier to print these out. What would happen is we would take the head off but keep the body on set. And I could work on the brow and change the expressions of the mouths. Even the eye lids are made of the same material. With the Pirate Captain, we wouldn't have the beard but the main face and the moustache, which would be cast as blank.

"From there, we would make extreme expressions, which would then get scanned into the computer so that somebody could make about 10 different mouth shapes. And from that point, I would be handed them over so I could build this set of mouths. For the captain, there are about 257 mouths. And that's for the dialogue and the expressions. Obviously, you can't manipulate as you would with clay, so you have to remake them. So I would take the blend shapes and then move them in the computer and those would work toward whatever mouth you want to put on."

Darren Thompson, Key Animator, animating Curvaceous Pirate on the Ship.

Meanwhile, from the outset, it was clear that The Pirates would need to rely on VFX to fill in the gaps to animate what couldn't be done by hand. "About half the shots were pretty simple for us -- adding sky and background," says Andrew Morley, the VFX supervisor. But others involved much more complicated procedures, such as building much of Blood Island (where pirate debauchery takes place early in the film). "They built the harbor in the shop, but we had to turn that into a full island with a volcano in the distance," Morley adds. The VFX team also animated several characters in the distant background.

Blood Island. Click to view larger image.

But Lord fires a cautionary note about getting mired in so much detail. "The whole process gets slower and slower and a lot more agonizing. I actually believe in working as fast as you can. The faster you work, the more you hold the spirit of the shot or scene in your head. So that was my thinking. Some animators love to suffer -- it's a kind of macho thing. But I'm interested in animation energy and performance energy."

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Bill Desowitz is former senior editor of AWN and VFXWorld. He's the owner of the Immersed in Movies blog (www.billdesowitz.com), a regular contributor to Thompson on Hollywood at Indiewire and author of the forthcoming James Bond Unmasked (Spies), which chronicles the 50-year evolution of 007 on screen and features interviews with all six actors.