Jolly Roger (1999) User Reviews

kind of cute...at first

[planktonrules · 6/10 · 12 February 2008]

The film begins with a pirate ship sacking an innocent ship and stealing the treasure. Out of sheer meanness, they toss the survivors overboard--one of which is the lady whose treasure they stole and she repeatedly yells "revenge".

This is a very, very simply animated film and yet, at least at first, I found it rather cute. Seeing the silly animations and the pirates made me smile--particularly since I am a history teacher and teach a unit on piracy. However, after a while, the film just seemed to go on and on too long and the eventual payoff wasn't there. I wanted to love this film--in the end, I only mildly liked it.

By the way, it was nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1999.

Fascinating short where the most interesting characters are a parrot and some rats

[llltdesq · 9/10 · 8 March 2014]

This short was nominated for an Academy Award for Animated Short. There will be spoilers ahead:

This short is about pirates. A pirate ship engages a ship, boards it, takes a whole lot of rum and a trunk on board the pirate ship and then tosses the various crew and passengers of the ship they captured overboard. One of them is a woman dressed in black who continually shouts "Revenge!" at the captain and crew of the pirate ship. They then sink the captured ship and you see rats leave the sinking vessel for the pirate ship. It's a recurring theme.

There's a parrot on the pirate ship with a remarkable gift for mimicry. This parrot repeatedly advances the plot simply by repeating things said by other characters at fortuitous moments. For there's a second, rather amateurish, pirate ship (with a crew of two) whose captain has delusions of grandeur and whose crew of one is a rather large but verbally limited chap who obeys all orders immediately. You can see how having a parrot around with a talent for mimicry has the potential to cause problems.

The second pirate ship manages to take the trunk away from the first one and also fishes the revenge-minded woman from the water and life really gets interesting.

Matters escalate until the rather troubling and unsettling conclusion. Be careful what you wish for, the end result might not be terribly appealing.

This is available on DVD and is well worth tracking down. Most recommended.