A new featurette for the upcoming animated comedy The Pirates! Band of Misfits has gone online. The film comes from Aardman Animations, the studio behind Chicken Run and Arthur Christmas, and if you think all their wacky jokes and oddball humor are amusing, just wait until you see what goes into putting that goofiness onscreen. The stop-motion animation process for The Pirates! took 18 months to shoot. That’s a year and a half spent filming one movie. This featurette takes you behind-the-scenes of the incredible work the people at Aardman do and reveals just how difficult it is to put together a stop-motion film of this magnitude

Hit the jump to watch the featurette. The film features the voices of Hugh Grant, Martin Freeman, David Tennant, Jeremy Piven, and Imelda Staunton. The Pirates! Band of Misfits opens in 3D on April 27th.

Click over to Yahoo! to watch in HD.

Here’s the official synopsis for The Pirates! Band of Misfits:

In The Pirates! Band of Misfits, Hugh Grant stars in his first animated role as the luxuriantly bearded Pirate Captain – a boundlessly enthusiastic, if somewhat less-than-successful, terror of the High Seas. With a rag-tag crew at his side (Martin Freeman, Brendan Gleeson, Russell Tovey, and Ashley Jensen), and seemingly blind to the impossible odds stacked against him, the Captain has one dream: to beat his bitter rivals Black Bellamy (Jeremy Piven) and Cutlass Liz (Salma Hayek) to the much coveted Pirate Of The Year Award. It’s a quest that takes our heroes from the shores of exotic Blood Island to the foggy streets of Victorian London. Along the way they battle a diabolical queen (Imelda Staunton) and team up with a haplessly smitten young scientist (David Tennant), but never lose sight of what a pirate loves best: adventure!