IT'S A PLUNDERFUL LIFE!

Earlier this year saw the release of what was undoubtedly Aardman Animations most ambitious, elaborately-detailed feature film, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists (or as audiences in the USA saw it, The Prates! A Band of Misfits).

Based on the wittily inventive books by Gideon Defoe, The Pirates! is shortly to be released on DVD and Blu-ray and, to accompany it, comes my book, The Making of The Pirates!, a lavishly illustrated, behind-the-scenes tour of the Aardman studio where Plasticine people come alive and have the most outlandish adventures.

The film follows the fortunes (and misfortunes) of a bumbling bunch of buccaneers – led by the magnificently bearded (but totally incompetent) Pirate Captain – whose ineptitude in their chosen profession is given an unexpectedly positive boost when their fate become inexplicably (and inextricably) tangled up with that of Charles Darwin and Queen Victoria.

Those book is packed with fascinating detail about how the characters – pirates and landlubbers alike – developed, and how their worlds (the Pirate Headquarters on Blood Island, the Royal Palaces and fog-filled alley-ways of Victorian London and, aboard ship, on the high seas) were designed and built.

With contributions from the film's director (creator of Morph and co-founder of Aardman), Peter Lord, along with the designers, art-directors, model-makers, animators and special effects boffins, the book takes you inside the process of creating a film through the painfully painstaking process of stop-motion animation.

There are also intriguing insights into the characters from the starry cast of voice talents who speak for the film's Plasticine players: Hugh Grant, Martin Freeman, David Tennant, Imelda Staunton and Brian Blessed.

I have had a long and very happy collaboration over many years with Aardman Animations from the time when I worked with Nick Park on the first draft screenplay for The Wrong Trousers, through several books – notably Cracking Animation and Chicken Run: Hatching the Movie – so I was delighted to be able (between chronicling the goings-on with the hobbits in Middle-earth) to chart the course of this beautifully preposterous piratical carry-on from page to screen.

AAAAAAAAARGH!

Avast and belay, ye swabs! You'll forgive the Robert Newton vernacular, me hearties, but I'm currently writing a book about the making of Aardman's The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists – or, as they be calling it in our former colony on the other side of the Atlantic, The Pirates! Band of Misfits.

It be hungry work, scribing, and tiring of the usual ration of ship's biscuits (them weevils be so indigestible, even when dunked in ye finest rum) I have decided that I needs a few of these little beauties to chomp on while scratching away with me quill...

Ye'll find other unusual edibles at Ye Unemployed Philosophers Guild.

And listen up, ye cursed land-lubbers, if so be it ye have not yet seen The Pirates! then be sure to catch it while you can or face the wrath of the Pirate Captain and a watery assignation with Davey Jones...

JUMPING JELLYFISH!

"Plundering porpoises!
Scuttling cuttlefish!
Battling barnacles!
Harrowing hurricanes!"

How can I have possible have overlooked the recent passing of the cartoonist, illustrator and animator, JOHN RYAN...?

He was the creator of almost three decades of childhood icons, first in the pages of comics like Eagle, Swift and Girl with Harris Tweed, Sir Boldasbrass and Lettice Leefe and then as one of the masters of BBC Children's TV with Mary, Mungo and Midge, Sir Prancealot and the long-suffering Lady Hysteria.

But, above all, John Ryan gave us that kind-hearted (yet basically cowardly and inept) buccaneer, Captain Horatio Pugwash, who sailed the main in his ship, the 'Black Pig', and whose exploits were always introduced by that memorable hornpipe theme tune as played on the concertina by Tom the Cabin Boy.

John, who died on 23 July, aged 88, was a modest, witty, gentleman who - long before the age of high-tech animated kids' TV shows - created charming little films brought to life with cut-out cardboard figures enacting their simple dramas in a world of painted story-book settings.

I had the pleasure of meeting John on a number of occasions when we shared judging honours at an annual competition for young pavement artists.

I always enjoyed talking and corresponding with this engaging man who, with his cravats and fly-away hair, cut a somewhat dandified figure but who was also a sensitive, serious-minded man and, as a devout Christian, was the resident cartoonist on The Catholic Herald and the author of several biblical-based picture books for children. John was always most at home talking to his youthful fans and drawing them pictures of Captain Pugwash and his arch-nemesis Cut-Throat Jake.

Here's a snippet from one of those Pugwash adventures as a reminder of a talent that brightened the young lives of so many of us...

Thanks for all the fun, John, and I wish your spirit a calm sea, a following breeze and a safe harbour in which to drop anchor...