Early Man moves with the times in old-fashioned way
Early Man Where: Cineplex Odeon Westshore, SilverCity Starring: Voices of Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams Directed by: Nick Park, Parental advisory: G Rating: Three stars It’s almost impossible not to be charmed by the claymation creations of British animation studio Aardman Animations — the creator of Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run and Shaun the Sheep.
While traditional computergenerated animation keeps pushing the technology closer to photorealism, the stop-motion technique of Aardman isn’t going for realism, but expressiveness. It’s incredible what a simple nudge to the clay can convey.
Their latest film, Early Man, directed by Gromit and Chicken Run director Nick Park, is an ageold tale. It starts in the neoPleistocene era, “somewhere near Manchester.” While dinosaurs and cavemen battle over lunch, an asteroid hits Earth, leaving a lava hot sphere that the cavemen kick around, and soon, the beautiful game, football — or soccer, if you will — is born, and immortalized on cave walls.
A few generations later, caveman Dug (Eddie Redmayne) is living happily with his tribe in the valley, yearning for adventure while he and his pals hunt rabbits. He gets it when the new era rolls into town — the Bronze Age. Say goodbye to the Stone Age, because the might of metal is here, and soon the snooty, French-accented Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston) is banishing the cavemen to the Badlands.
When Dug sneaks into the city, he discovers football and challenges Nooth to a match for his valley back. Nooth accepts, dreaming of the piles of “shnookers” he’ll rake in from fans clamouring to see the match.
That’s when Early Man goes from The Clan of the Cave Bear to The Bad News Bears as Dug tries to whip his team of cavemen into football fighting shape, with the help of city-dweller Goona (Maisie Williams).
The style is all Aardman, their characters sporting pliable foreheads and adorable overbites. The story is light, and it doesn’t go too deep, but it’s effective and rousing, relying on beloved sports movie tropes.
It’s the funny little details that make the film as delightful as it is. Like most Aardman films, it is packed to the brim with visual gags and makes great use of the reactions of wordless animal characters. Dug’s wild boar buddy Hognob, voiced by director Park, steals the show with his little grunts of surprise and plaintive howls. One sequence even has Hognob massaging Lord Nooth in the bath and playing the harp.
It’s those little moments of the surreal that make Aardman films so unique. There are mallards the size of a T-Rex, a spider covered in eyes, a “primordial soup” that gets up and walks away. One of the film’s best gags is a message bird who delivers word-for-word, gesture-for-gesture messages between Nooth and the Queen that get increasingly hostile.
Early Man is a blend of evolutionary humour and a tribute to football all wrapped up in a story that argues for inclusion of all people and an equal distribution of wealth, all in 89 tightly-paced and efficient minutes. And there are so many puns.
Truly, what more could you ask for?