Early Man review: A reminder of why stop motion animation is worth saving

The underdog animation technique gets its own underdog sports film - this time wrapped in prehistoric furs

Is stop motion animation in the battle against its own death? That portrait of the world is tempting. Modernity is equal to efficiency, as it would seem, so what place do we have for such unnecessary meticulousness?

The careful teasing of puppets, frame by frame; 30-40 animators labouring away, only to achieve about 5 seconds a week each – what’s the point? Is it not all antithetical to the digital age?

In fact, a good chunk of stop motion’s preservation comes off as almost anthropological in its approach. It’s the reserve of auteurists making an aesthetic choice, akin to evoking the lost wonders of silent film.

There was Charlie Kaufman enlisting Duke Johnson to make Anomalisa’s world one of alienation, animator Claude Barras’ My Life as a Courgette striking a chord with audiences in finding a child-like way to express emotions we assume are beyond children, or Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs allowing the director even more precise control over his curated universes.

But amongst it all, a few hardier warriors stand tall. Laika (best known for Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings) and Aardman Animations fight for the pure, pleasurable entertainment that can be found in the technique itself, and for its place as the rightful alternative to CGI that mainstream audiences deserve. And in Aardman’s latest, Early Man, those concerns have all managed to trickle – knowingly or unknowingly – onto the screen itself

The film tells the story of a tribe of Stone Age cavemen, who count the ever-intrepid Dug (Eddie Redmayne) amongst their members, faced with the unstoppable advance of Bronze Age civilisation rolling into their quiet, harmonious forest home.

They’re soon forced out, and into the barbarous Badlands, by the gnashing metal and looming mammoths under Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston)’s possession, who subdues his population with the thrill of the Sacred Game i.e. football.

Yes, Early Man is a classic underdog sports film wrapped in prehistoric furs, as Dug challenges Lord Nooth and his team of Herculean idols to a match, with the return of his tribe’s forest home as its nail-biting stakes.

Their chances, of course, seem futile until Dug enlists the help of local Bronze Age-ian Goona (Maisie Williams), banned from the pitch due to her gender, whose skills and motivational speeches offer them just the hope they need. It’s not too hard to see where things go next.

Modernity may equal efficiency, but Early Man certainly substitutes its exhaustive animation techniques with laser-sharp focus elsewhere. There’s no single shot, movement, joke, or line of dialogue that seems wasted. No moment is superfluous. It even manages to be the rare sports movie in which its climactic final match doesn’t actually feel over-drawn in some way.

The downside is that there’s no room for risk here either, and Early Man’s humour ends up largely playing into familiar tropes: a Flinstones-esque sight gag of a beetle used as a razor here, a football pun about “Early Man United” there.

Early Man’s heart is in the familiar, in the irresistible British charm that made Wallace and Gromit a household favourite, in the warm comfort of that which is handmade; things that never fail to feel more personal and beloved in their creation, that seem to take pleasure in small things.

It’s no coincidence that despite Aardman moving onto highly intricate silicone puppets, feats of modern technology in their own right, they still so deliberately play into the well-thumbed look of traditional plasticine.

However, in its tale of a small community fighting against an inevitable future, it’s interesting to also see a level of self-examination: why exactly do we cling to the things we do? We do they feel like they’re worth preserving? Early Man may be another underdog sports film, but it’s one that simultaneously paints stop motion animation itself as the underdog waiting for ultimate victory.

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