In recent years, the idea of a new Aardman movie has been more delightful than the actual films. The celebrated animation house, which helped give the world the acclaimed Peter Gabriel video for “Sledgehammer” and Nick Park’s Oscar-winning, basically perfect Wallace and Gromit shorts, has struggled to make the transition to features. Recent entries such as Arthur Christmas, The Pirates! Band of Misfits and Shaun the Sheep Movie had their appeal, but the strategic simplicity of these films has also left them feeling a little slight. Each of them would have been dynamite at 25 minutes.
With Early Man, Park has made his first feature since 2005’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit—and his first non-Wallace and Gromit film since 2000’s Chicken Run—and it’s a sly, unexpectedly emotional comedy with lots of goofy laughs and the occasionally inspired bit of business. But fair or not, it’s hard not to compare this prehistoric laugher to Aardman’s (and Park’s) brilliant past. The wit, sweetness and handmade charm remain, but the ability to wow is less in evidence.
The stop-motion film introduces us to Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne), a kindly caveman who thinks his tribe, led by Chief Bobnar (voiced by Timothy Spall), needs to stop settling for rabbits to hunt and instead go after bigger game. But their peaceful, albeit meager existence is interrupted by an invading Bronze Age army, which kicks them out of their valley homeland and condemns them to live in the inhospitable Badlands. As a way to return to the valley, Dug offers the Bronze Army’s snooty Lord Nooth (voiced by Tom Hiddleston) a deal: If his tribe can beat Nooth’s elite athletes in a soccer match, they can remain in the valley. If they lose, Dug and his friends will have to work in Nooth’s grueling mines.
Chicken Run, which Park co-directed with Aardman co-founder Peter Lord, succeeded in part because of its cheeky tweaking of the prison-breakout movie. Early Man cycles through a few genres—Park reportedly pitched the film as a mixture of Gladiator and Dodgeball—but it’s primarily an underdog sports movie, pitting our lovable losers against a superior squad, the whole film building to the finale’s big game.
Park packs Early Man with sight gags, slapstick and groan-worthy wordplay. (A lot of Dug’s fellow cavemen aren’t very bright, a fact that the filmmaker never tires of exploiting for comedic fodder.) It’s a gentle, relaxed film, lacking the hyperactive hipness of Hollywood animated movies or the sleek expertise of Pixar. But the relying on genre tropes both anchors and limits Early Man. Park smoothly pilots this film around and through certain narrative conventions—training-montage clichés are parodied, familiar sports-movie characters are rejiggered—and there’s a pleasing familiarity to the whole endeavor. But there’s also a ceiling to how funny or touching any of this is.