PREHYSTERICS
‘Early Man’ evolves into big laugh fest
The happily retrograde “Early Man” from director Nick Park (“Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the WereRabbit”) and the marvelous British company Aardman Animations is a comic meditation upon the origins of football, and by football I do not mean the sport played by Tom Brady. I mean the game that is a part of the DNA of people in every other part of the world and is known in this country as soccer.
In opening scenes of this stop-motion animated comic gem, examples of early man (and, ahem, woman), who bear a striking facial resemblance to the lovable creature known as Shaun the Sheep, see a fiery object fall from the sky. Inside the glowing sphere is another oddly shaped sphere, which the men and women happily begin to kick around. Voila.
Generations later, Chief Bobnar (voice of Timothy Spall) leads a group of Stone Age tribespeople, who sound like working-class Brits and have forgotten football and inhabit an Edenic valley where they live happily if hungrily off rabbits and “primordial soup,” which one must eat quickly.
But the tribespeople, including the film’s young protagonist Dug (Academy Award winner Eddie Redmayne), who dreams of hunting mammoths and has a pet wild boar named Hognob (grunting sounds by Nick Park), are unhappily displaced by armed Bronze Age humans, who steal the valley for the ore they greedily mine and force “the primitives” into the dreaded and inhospitable badlands, where among the dangers they face are active volcanoes and a giant sawtoothed mallard.
The Bronze Age usurpers are led by the evil, supercovetous, oddly familiar Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston). Nooth serves Queen Oofeefa (Miriam Margolyes), who, in one of the funniest bits, sends a creature called Message Bird (Rob Brydon) to communicate with Nooth. But in fact Nooth steals from the till of the stadium where the Bronze Age people watch soccer played by superstars. One of the ardent fans is Goona (Maisie Williams), a young woman who dreams of playing soccer but is barred from the all-male teams.
After being brought to the city and stadium of the Bronze Age people, plucky if reckless Dug challenges the local team to a game against his Stone Age people and agrees that if they lose, they will pay dearly. He has very little time to train his team with Goona’s help.
Thus, “Early Man” becomes a kind of stony Bronze Age “The Longest Yard,” with the primitives as an “Early Man”-chester United. One of Aardman’s “Monty Python”like tricks is that its comedy seems very low with lowbrow characters, bad puns and pratfalls. But it is in truth very wise, skewering human nature, vices and quirks.
“Early Man” ridicules not only obvious villains such as Lord Nooth, but also colonialism, the idea that technological superiority conveys moral authority, and the lack of gender and racial inclusiveness. Say hello to Mr. Rock (no, not that Rock). He’s smarter than he looks.
(“Early Man” contains rude humor and cartoon violence.)