Plasticine Man
Wallace and Gromit’s creator returns with a labour of love
It’s so important to choose the right materials for the task at hand, and when it comes to animating a pig nervously giving a back massage to a fat man in the bath, only Plasticine will do. Watch Early Man, the new film from Aardman Animations, and you’ll understand. Mere words can’t do the sequence justice, even ones like “wibble” and “moob”. It’s the kind of comic set-piece you find yourself laughing about days later.
But ever since the Creature Comforts days, that’s always been the Aardman way. Their characters’ comic power seems to bulge and ripple from within, squeezed into the clay with every animator’s pinch and tweak. Perhaps Early Man feels so infused with bygone craftsmanship because it is the first Aardman film in 10 years to have been directed by Nick Park, the creator of Wallace and Gromit and devisor of the Bristol-based studio’s pop-eyed and orthodontically challenged house style. Or it might just feel old-fashioned because it’s set in caveman times.
Starting in the Neo-pleistocene era – because when a pun like that just presents itself, you don’t turn it down – Early Man is about a tribe of stoneage stragglers in a world that’s moved on to bronze. Foremost among them is Dug (Eddie Redmayne), who hunts rabbits in a fertile valley. Past the forests lie nothing but lava-scarred badlands – or so Dug thinks.
Then a raiding party stomps in on mammoth-back, led by the grasping, supercilious Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston), and equipped with all the latest newly smelted tech.
They claim the place for themselves, and Dug’s people can do nothing about it. Their only hope – which is just about rationalised, plot-wise – is to win back their land in a high-stakes football match against Nooth’s club.
Despite having no prior awareness of the game’s existence, the tribe accepts, and training begins immediately – with help from a talented young wannabe, Goona (Maisie Williams), whose name is presumably a forerunner of the modern-day Arsenal fan. There is, quite literally, everything to play for.
If Chicken Run was Aardman’s take on The Great Escape, think of this as their Escape to Victory, with Sylvester Stallone switched for a sabre-toothed pig. Park and his screenwriters, Mark Burton and John O’farrell, mess around with the conventions of the underdog sports film as best they can, but you sometimes sense the collective Aardman imagination has been held back by everything the film is obliged to get through, just in order to reach the final showdown on the pitch.
Even so, no frame is wasted, and every scene is crammed with so much casual comic detail, repeat viewings are more or less required.
Despite the use of technology that allows for sweeping crowds and landscapes on a scale rarely seen in stop-motion animation, the traditional, heart-swelling hallmarks of the medium also remain in glorious evidence. I mean the flicker of fingerprints across the models’ faces, as subtly enlivening as candlelight, and the gentle ruffling of their hair from frame to frame, as it’s brushed by unseen hands.
The miracle of great stop-motion has always been that the films look loved. As you watch Early Man, you can feel it.