Movie Review: 'Early Man'

I have always enjoyed the work of Aardman Animation. The Aardman brand of animation is good-natured, pleasant and always amusing. The latest Aardman effort, Early Man, featuring the voice of Academy Award winner, Eddie Redmayne, is in keeping with the good-natured, pleasant, and amusing Aardman brand. This story of cavemen, Bronze Age baddies, and soccer is well accomplished and consistent if not all that memorable.

Dug (Redmayne) has big dreams about hunting. While his tribe, led by Chief Bobnar (Timothy Spall) seems content to sleep all day and occasionally hunt rabbits, Dug dreams of taking down a woolly mammoth. Dug’s dreams, however, go on hold when the tribe’s Eden-esque sanctuary is invaded by the minions of Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston) who, while the cavemen were stuck in the Stone Age, evolved into the Bronze Age with all the requisite weapons and gadgetry.

Run from their idyllic homes and into the rugged badlands, the tribe is ready to try and make do until Dug confronts Lord Nooth and is given one chance to save his home. Eons earlier, Dug’s ancestors discovered and then quit playing soccer. Now, Dug must teach his fellow cave dwellers to relearn the game in order to battle Lord Nooth’s soccer champions, Reale Bronze, for the right to get their home back.

Like most of the Aardman brand, Early Man has an easy-to-follow story, an oafish but harmless baddie, well voiced by Hiddleston as a pompous ass, and just enough stakes to make us care. There isn’t anything particularly special going on but in the day and age of movies for kids such as Peter Rabbit, it’s hard to find fault with the gentle and pleasant style of Aardman even if it isn’t anything spectacular, rather just sort of good.

Many critics before me have lauded the style of Aardman’s handcrafted claymation, almost to the point where we take for granted the hard work behind it. In Early Man we see fingerprints in the clay; we can see minor flaws in the animation that are charming hallmarks of the Aardman brand. Yes, this isn’t new, it’s classically Aardman, but it’s important nevertheless to recognize the hard work behind Early Man in order to fully appreciate it.

That hard work stands out far more than the story and characters of Early Man which, unlike the characters in a Pixar movie, rarely have much depth. Dug is a sweetheart and Redmayne gives him a winning voice but there isn’t much to him beyond just being easy to root for. The supporting cast, aside from Hiddleston who gets to ham it up big time as the baddie, is forgettable and have even less depth than our ill-defined hero.

Nick Park is terrific at being charming and creating characters and situations that are easy to enjoy. It’s strange to treat these characteristics as flaws because they certainly are not. Where Park and Aardman’s style suffers is in comparison only. We’ve been spoiled in the last three decades by arguably the finest run of animated movies ever, even better than Disney’s hand-drawn era of the 40’s and 50’s.

Pixar has given us not merely animation, but brilliant animation in the form of masterpieces of the genre. I don’t need to run down the Pixar resume because you are already doing that in your head. Pixar’s brand is funny and moving, adventurous and exhilarating.

The work of Pixar since the late 90’s has set a standard so high that even current Academy Award frontrunner Coco has been compared unfavorably to Pixar’s past efforts.

Aardman’s charm is unceasing but they have yet to combine characters, humor, pathos and unbridled joy in the way Pixar has. Aardman hasn’t put out a truly bad movie but there are no masterpieces on the company resume and Early Man is one of the lesser efforts compared even to just that resume. It’s unfair to ask Aardman or any company to deliver constant masterpieces of the genre but in this era, in order to stand out against Pixar, you kind of have to.

Early Man is far from a masterpiece. It’s not bad by any stretch and is truly accomplished in terms of claymation works. But that’s where it ends, with a good deal of charm and appreciation for the hard work. In the end, Early Man and the work of Aardman Animation is gentle, pleasant, charming and forgettable. That said, they do have the best animated rabbits in any animated feature, including any created by Pixar.