Artisanal animation effort not quite one for the ages
For two decades Nick Park has proven himself to be one of animation’s true geniuses. Beginning with his Wallace and Gromit films and including the Oscar-winning whimsy of his Creature Comforts series and children’s favourite Shaun the Sheep, Park’s facility for combining the hard work of his plasticine stop-motion and very British sense of humour has brought him multiple Oscars and created a unique genre that’s given much pleasure over the years to adults and children alike.
If you’ve seen the documentary about Aardman, the company started in the 1970s by Peter Lord and David Sproxton, which Park joined as a student, then you’ll know that in the flesh Park is also one of the nicest and most unassuming people in the business.
All of which is just a way of saying that it’s a hard task to not like anything he does — but unfortunately not everything he touches is necessarily gold. That’s the fault of a world in which the painstaking hard and years-long work that goes into creating his stop-motion visions have been superseded by a glut of cheap imitations and immediate demand for animation thrills and jokes that his style may not be able to satisfy.
In Early Man, his first feature film as sole director, Park delivers on a technical level while not necessarily satisfying the demands of a market in which adults are hoping for some clever nudgenudge-wink-wink asides that make it OK for them to enjoy the film as much as their wards.
The story begins with a sequence set in the “neo-plasticine era,” “somewhere near Manchester, around lunch time”, which winks to the early history of special effects as practised by the legendary Hollywood pioneer Roy Harryhausen. It introduces us to a world populated by cave dwellers and dinosaurs disrupted by the arrival of a meteorite, which kills off the reptiles and provides the humans with a hot-potato piece of rock that they use to discover the beautiful game of football.
Cut to “a few ages later” and we meet Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne) and his trusty warthog sidekick Hognob (grunts provided by Park himself), members of a small tribe of rabbit-hunting people whose lives are disrupted by the arrival of a Bronze Age tribe led by ze French, sneering Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston), who take over ze cavemen’s valley and begin to mine it for ze precious bronze.
When Dug makes a deal that his tribe will play a game of football against the Bronze Age champions Real Bronzio for the life of his tribe’s precious valley, the stage is set for many puns and plenty of wry references to the world of football, Brexit and sexism in the modern age.
It’s all pleasantly off-the-wall and filled with old-school British humour, but there’s something missing — whether you’re an adult watcher or an adult forced to watch for the sake of the kids.
While it’s impossible not to commend Park’s dedication to his craft and its agetaking, real-time necessity to create, there’s a little bit of a sinking, underwhelming familiarity to the enterprise that is hard to shake.
Yes, you had to make millions of minuscule adjustments to make these characters come alive, but on the other hand so many things have happened in all the years you’ve been working on it that it would have been nice to see them more smartly reflected in the final product.
Puns and Flintstone jokes just don’t cut it any more and while Aardman has never been known for its daring satirical thrust, it’s certainly produced films that were smarter, more satisfying and, dare I say it, more interesting than this.
As an animation within the overall genre it’s certainly impressive, but as a piece of stopmotion within the hugely impressive archive of Aardman, the leaders of the pack, it doesn’t quite hold up.
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Early Man is on circuit