One Million Years B.C. inspired Park’s latest project
LOS ANGELES — The kooky caveman characters that come to life in Early Man have been kicking around in Nick Park’s imagination for decades.
Long before he created Wallace and Gromit, Park was taken with Ray Harryhausen’s animated dinosaurs in the 1966 Raquel Welch movie One Million Years B.C.
“I just couldn’t believe real dinosaurs were moving around with people,” Park said, recalling the film he saw as an 11-year-old that would inspire his love of animation.
Early Man translates Park’s vision into an epic claymation adventure about a tribe of colourful cavepeople who stake the future of their homeland on a soccer showdown, despite not knowing how to play. An ambitious young caveman Dug and his loyal pet warthog Hognob believe the plucky tribe can prevail.
“I’ve never seen a prehistoric underdog sports movie before,” Park mused.
U.K.-based Aardman Studios tapped its largest production team yet — with nearly 40 animators and sets working at once — to make Early Man, which uses stop-motion animation techniques essentially unchanged since Harryhausen’s day.
It’s a slow and painstaking process to bring clay characters to life.
“We’ve used some of the most advanced filmmaking techniques in post-production together with stop-motion, which is as old as cinema itself,” said animation director Merlin Crossingham.
Stop-motion animation creates the illusion of movement through a series of still images. For Early Man, Aardman’s team of artists built a cast of puppets based on Park’s sketches that serve as the film’s actors. Each seven-inch-tall silicone puppet has a jointed metal skeleton inside so it can move.
“They’re like expensive action figures,” Crossingham said.
Animators pose the puppets for each frame — every movement, every gesture — with 24 frames in each second of film. Mouth movements are synchronized to pre-recorded vocal performances. (Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston and Maisie Williams lend their talents here.) For every shot, the puppets are bolted into place on detailed sets that stand about two feet high.