Lionsgate: Animated/Comedy. 89 minutes.
Once upon a time, the mere suggestion of a new Pixar film would transport your average adult moviegoer back to childhood with the expectation, always fulfilled, that complicated computer graphics would be employed to tell a simple story that explored a universal, sometimes difficult, theme with humor and heart. Those days, alas, are over. Maybe it was inevitable but the pressure of constantly creating new product under Disney’s unforgiving gaze has resulted in formula-creep, where even the better Pixar films (and its batting average remains excellent) can feel too worked over and mechanical.
There was also a time when the mere suggestion of anything new from that animation giant across the pond, Aardman Studios, was cause for celebration. Launched in 1972 by British school chums Peter Lord and David Sproxton, Aardman had already won three Oscars for Best Animated Short Film by the time it produced its first full-length feature, Chicken Run in 2000. Their films, whether short or long, were delightfully inventive, free-spirited and brimming with handcrafted detail. Those days, alas, are also over. Or maybe they’ve just taken a well-deserved vacation. Either way, Early Man is Aardman’s first bonafide disappointment. The pain is even more acute considering this curious misfire was directed by the man responsible for Aardman’s first three Animated Short Film Oscars and a subsequent Oscar in 2006. Nick Park joined Aardman Studios fulltime in 1985 and created the company’s signature characters, cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his silent dog, Gromit. After taking home Academy Awards for his short films, Creature Comforts (1989, where the nominees included his own, A Grand Day Out), The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995), Park and co-director Steve Box won the Oscar for Best Animated Film, in a Pixar-free 2005, for the rollicking Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit.
It would be 13 years before Park directed another full-length Aardman film and, while he can’t be faulted for wanting to make his eagerly-awaited return (and solo feature directing debut) sans Wallace and Gromit, Early Man is a humor and storytelling regression, even as he avails himself of production tools that have advanced mightily since the mid-aughts.
A key component of Aardman’s success is its ability to mine cheeky, offbeat, vaguely naughty humor from every corner of a story’s environment. In its last film, the delightful Shaun the Sheep Movie, the frame is filled edge-to-edge with pun-filled storefronts, goofy sight gags and other visual amusements. In every Wallace and Gromit adventure, Wallace’s home bursts with clever touches and the Rube Goldberg contraption that allows him to get dressed and out the door every morning never fails to amuse.
However, the environment in Early Man is, shall we say, not target rich. Not only does a story about cavemen (and cavewomen) operating mostly in a large, barren, rocky wasteland remove too many opportunities for visual humor, but whatever humor there was to glean from such a milieu was mostly exhausted between The Flintstones, 1981’s stoner classic Caveman, a very small percentage of B.C. comics and The Croods, the marginally-funny 2013 Dreamworks release that originated with Aardman under the working title, Crood Awakening.
At least the company’s plasticine character designs have not changed. Tactile and playful, these creations radiate a warmth that comes from sensing the manipulations of their creators’ hands, something CGI can never accomplish. Their round, often browless, eyes and too-large teeth jutting forward from an ever-present overbite evoke childhood memories of Play-Doh. You want to reach out and touch them. Early Man features a winning new Claymation character: Dug, expressively voiced by Eddie Redmayne, is a teenage caveman living in a verdant valley (beautifully rendered to the last blade of grass). Dug hunts for rabbits with the rest of his tribe that includes Chief Bobnar (Timothy Spall), a bunch of unmemorable characters who chime in now and again and a pig named Hognob, notable because he’s voiced by director Nick Park.
Although the company’s resume does include all-CGI feature length films, one of Aardman’s charms is its championing of old-school animation methods in the face of less labor intensive, more advanced technology. This might be the idea behind the invasion of Dug’s primitive idyll by ironclad, mammoth-riding, Bronze Age marauders led by the buffoonish, pompous Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston, scoring chuckles with his poofy French accent). Nooth is hell-bent on decimating Dug’s beloved valley and turning it into a mining operation. The banishing of Dug and his friends to the foreboding Badlands, with the ever-present possibility of dying “a slow, lingering death” is a little dark for an Aardman film. It’s still plenty fine for the kids, but outside their house style.
To win back his home, Dug challenges his Bronze Age adversaries to, for some reason, a soccer match, possibly the least interesting development imaginable. We should have seen this coming: the idea was set up in the very first scene as a meteor hits Earth, kills off the dinosaurs and leads to the invention of soccer. After Nooth accepts Dug’s challenge, Early Man invests itself in the sport to such a heartbreaking degree that one wonders why Park, who travelled back to the Bronze Age for his first feature length directing effort in 13 years, would want to make his original characters play out a by-the-numbers underdog sports story. Especially since, quoting the production notes, “Nick isn’t interested in football.” Maybe because in about 4000 years, the 2018 World Cup will begin and Aardman needs a global hit after the disappointing returns from Shaun the Sheep Movie? Maybe because he wants to make a gender equality statement with the character of Goona (Game of Thrones star Maisie Williams), prohibited in Bronze Age society from playing soccer because she’s a woman? Whatever the reason, montages of the good guys making Amateur Hour mistakes while the overconfident bad guy preens are dreadfully tired, even in the hands of Aardman, and further cements the opinion that Early Man is too reliant on a constant stream of slapstick gags. And the surprise-free final match, which, in function if not form, is the same as every other cinematic final match, is fairly depressing to watch. The soccer pitch might be “sacred turf” and the game itself “sent from Heaven”, but even the most diehard footie aficionado might wonder if any of this is making the movie funnier.
Early Man does have some laughs. Park and his team are too gifted to fail completely. Fans of the studio’s well-known ability to create fully realized environments will find brief satisfaction as Dug wanders around a Bronze Age market (Jurassic Pork, anyone?). Otherwise, the storytelling is too straightforward, the humor is not as inventive as we’ve come to expect from Aardman and the whole soccer situation is confounding and disappointing.
Aardman Studios will, of course, survive. While most viewers, especially Stateside, know only Wallace & Gromit, the company is quite prolific. They’ve created feature length films, short films, television shows, commercials, PSA’s, music videos and even a VR experience about migrants journeying from Turkey to Greece. So maybe the problem is they’re stretched too thin. If that’s the case, hopefully Early Man, their seventh feature film, will serve as a dumping ground for their second-tier ideas and now this otherwise stellar company can get back on track. In the meantime, mark your calendars: Pixar’s The Incredibles 2 premieres June 15.