“Early Man” is the latest feature from Aardman Animations.
It is Saturday night, and director Nick Park could have been out celebrating the premiere earlier that evening of his latest Aardman animated feature, “Early Man,” in Preston, Lancashire, his hometown. But instead, Park is on the phone to America, considering the differences between American and British animation.
Aardman Animations is the British studio famous for its meticulous and tactile stop-motion work. That sets it apart from studios like Disney, DreamWorks and the Bay Area’s Pixar. But the American studio Laika is also committed to stopmotion, and so are American directors like Tim Burton and Wes Anderson.
“There are all sorts of little things, tastes and cultural differences,” says four-time Oscar winner Park, 59. “I think Americans are bigger on the emotional side than we are in terms of emotional arcs and payoff. They do it in a more sweeping kind of way. We tend to be a little subtler.
“People talk about a British sense of humor a lot. When I show films in America, they always point out, ‘Oh, it’s very British.’ That being who I am, I don’t know what that is. I just do things that are true to me, that come from my own environment.”
Park’s English sensibility is very much on display in “Early Man,” in which the Stone Age meets the Bronze Age in a fight over a pastoral valley that is settled with a soccer match between a ragtag Stone Age team and sleek Bronze Age pros.
“There’s a bit of history there with the English never being able to beat anyone at the World Cup and claiming to have invented the game,” says Park.
“I didn’t really want to make an underdog sports movie. I’ve always loved the idea of a caveman and cavewoman film. I was drawing a caveman, a typical caveman wielding a club. And I did a drawing where a caveman is hitting a rock. It was a bit like baseball, or what we would call rounders. That got me to thinking about cavemen and sport and maybe sport as a civilizing force and the
whole tribal aspect of what we call football.”
There are two dinosaurs in “Early Man,” Ray and Harry, named for artist Ray Harryhausen. Park was obsessed with dinosaurs as a boy, and remembers constantly drawing them. He cites the specialeffects wizard’s work on a childhood favorite, “One Million Years BC,” as the thing that inspired him to start modeling dinosaurs, animating them with his family’s Bell and Howell 8mm camera. It was the beginning of Park’s long, unending love affair with clay.
“At heart, I like the real material,” Park says. “The clay, the fur, the texture. Personally, I love the look and the process of it, the magic of a figure that’s real coming to life.”