Aardman films don't come out very often, but it's worth the wait because when one does, it's a work of art. The little English animation studio, home to those iconic figures of sculpted clay Wallace and Gromit, has won four Academy Awards for its handcrafted look and sweet, silly sensibility. It consistently delivers the quality work you can't achieve in a rush. In stop motion animation, capturing two seconds of footage is considered a solid day's work.
The studio's latest, "Early Man," lives up to its usual high standards, but at even a larger scale and with bigger production values. It turns the Aardman's absolutely astounding attention to detail toward a new but very old story. With a fresh cast of characters in a pre-Neolithic world of cave men, dinosaurs and erupting volcanoes, it gives us the first prehistoric underdog sports comedy.
It was epochs in the making, and, as usual, it was worth every millennium.
The opening is a concise primer on ancient history as a flaming asteroid races through the atmosphere to hit Earth. A nearby T-Rex and triceratops drop their gargantuan battle and frightfully hug each other for comfort. When the meteor hits, scorching round fragments roll up against the oversized feet of the local Neanderthal tribe, who kick them around like hot potatoes, adding goals for fun. Thus is born the Stone Age ancestor of the game that most of the world calls football.
As the vast crater blooms into a lush canyon surrounded by desert, its dozen-some inhabitants enjoy cheerful lives of digging up stones and unsuccessfully hunting rabbits. Their most engaging persona is Dug, an innocent, naive teen voiced by Eddie Redmayne. He's a younger version of Wallace, with the film's stand-in for Gromit played by his saber-toothed wild boar sidekick Hognob (grunted with fine oinks and growls by director and Aardman head Nick Park).
Complications arrive in the form of Lord Nooth, a pompous nincompoop riding what resembles a mechanical mammoth. "The age of stone is over. Long live the age of bronze," the metal-loving autocrat declares in a deliberately bad French accent supplied by Tom Hiddleston. His soldiers kick the locals out of their idyllic home to use its mines to extract Lord Nooth's cherished bronze _ which does not exist in nature, but let's not overthink this. The point is that they make glittering coins.
Making his way to the City of Bronze, Dug is captured by Nooth's sentries. With the grinning malice of a "Gladiator" tyrant, Nooth orders, "Take him away and kill him _ slowly." The guards march Dug away gradually. "No, no, no," Nooth irritably rephrases, "Take him away at a normal pace _ and then kill him!"
But before they can, Dug observes the mad fan base filling the city's vast stadium to see the swaggering local team Real Bronzio play football. Resourceful Dug realizes that his ragtag homies' best chance to win back their land is to challenge Nooth's club to a high-stakes game. Craving big gate profits from the game, Nooth agrees. Cue the makeshift, off-kilter training montages.
"Early Man" is a deeply British piece of work. It's a heartwarming, narrative-driven story that stands on its own much better than any gag-based Flintstones version could hope. Granted, it helps if you have some grasp on English humor for context. Being familiar with European football will assist you in catching the verbal references and visual puns. And a basic political knowledge of the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union through Brexit pays dividends. Dug's plucky team is called the Brutes, which sounds a lot like Brits, and all the opponents have fractured E.U. accents.
But you don't need to be a European history major to appreciate this beautifully plotted and paced charmer. If you liked the imperfect Philadelphia Eagles walloping the haughty New England Patriots at the Super Bowl, this is your kind of movie. And if you're fond of random appearances by gigantic mallards that can flatten people with their orange webbed feet, all the better.
