British auteur Nick Park, a four-time Oscar winner best-known as the creator of Wallace and Gromit, has directed three feature films to date: Chicken Run (co-directed with Peter Lord), The Curse of The Were-Rabbit and now Early Man. Any of these movies could be played with the sound off and little would be lost in translation. They are told with a visual clarity that never really ages.
They are also stop motion animations, their staging and construction slowed down by the painstaking nature of the format. Changing a scene (or even a shot) often means building things from scratch, so the filmmakers are encouraged to be disciplined but inventive – yielding some sensational results. As Orson Welles once put it: “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.”
In Early Man, Dug (voice of Eddie Redmayne) is the most ambitious, progressive member of a small tribe of cavemen who live a peaceful primitive life. Their simple existence is gate-crashed by an army from a more advanced society, suggesting Park will deliver a family friendly re-imagining of Mel Gibson’s bloodthirsty end-of-an-era epic Apocalypto. A flourishing city boggles the minds of the simple hunters and gatherers, who nevertheless show considerable grit when confronted with the prospect of annihilation.
At a key moment, Bronze Age leader Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston) addresses a huge audience (like in Apocalypto) leading to stadium style spectacle (like in Thor: Ragnarok) in the form of a quirky soccer match (like in Shaolin Soccer). That last point is important, because Early Man is very much a sports movie, its core, trite premise involving a group of rascal underdogs competing against puffed-up pros.
Park and screenwriters Mark Burton and James Higginson espouse a thoroughly European view of history: human progress measured by the evolution of a soccer match, and vice versa. City folk describe the football oval as ‘sacred turf,’ implying a society that uses sport to fill a hole left by the absence of more meaningful things (like art or religion). Or alternatively, a society that considers sport to be just as meaningful or meaningless as anything else (like art or religion).
The comedy transcends individual cultures, bubbling with life and thought, inventions such as the talking bird constituting a kind of ancient ‘life hack’.
Some scenes feature hilarious talking delivery birds, who listen to messages and relay them to recipients, miming the sender’s speech and body language. The feathered thespians reminded me of the ‘cameras’ author Terry Pratchett invented in his Discworld novels, which were tiny imps that can draw very fast.
These sort of inventions – useful for the characters and joyous for the viewer – represent Parker’s film at its best. The comedy transcends individual cultures, bubbling with life and thought, inventions such as the talking bird constituting a kind of ancient ‘life hack’. They are products of a society where technological desire mutates natural things – like the electric style hand razor Chief Bobnar (Timothy Spall) uses, which is actually just a huge, hungry insect, gnawing away at his beard.
From a non-football loving point-of-view, it’s a shame that Early Man is so obsessed with sport in general and soccer-centred concepts in particular – retreading the familiar terrain of goals, formations, training montages, yada yada. When the centrepiece match is declared a contest between the Stone Age and the Bronze Age, some hope arrives: that the game might emerge from the film’s themes, rather than the other way around. Sadly the latter is true.
This will be a selling point for soccer fanatics, however, who should consider Early Man a must-see. It is a preposterous and charming love letter to the sport, thoughtfully modeled in the spirit of a kind of piss-take historical revisionism. The film is too pure, too myopic to have much greater value, satirical or otherwise. However there are many occasions (particularly in the first half) when the comedy has nothing to do with the game, and everything to do with the craft.
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