Summary:
A peaceful Stone Age tribe is kicked out of their serene valley by a more advanced hostile civilization. In order to win their home back, the tribe members challenge their enemy to a game of soccer.
Dug and Hognob.
My Thoughts:
Dug (Eddie Redmayne, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”) is from a Stone Age tribe that lives in the middle of a picturesque valley. Inside this valley, everything is hunky dory. His tribe hunts rabbits to survive, stay up late dancing round the fire, sleep late, and otherwise seem to enjoy their lives without worry. But one day, Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston, “Avengers: Infinity War”) a snooty aristocrat from a more advanced civilization, lays siege to Dug’s village and immediately overruns it. Dug’s tribe is forced to flee to the harsh wasteland surrounding the valley, but Dug himself disappears during the attack.
He is accidentally brought to Lord Nooth’s Bronze Age city, where he explores and eventually wanders into soccer stadium. Because of a misunderstanding, Dug ends up playing on the field for a while, but the gig is up when he scores a goal for the opposite team. Lord Nooth orders his helmet removed and all the stadium is disgusted when they find out that a cave man had been allowed onto the field. However, seizing the spotlight, Dug challenges Lord Nooth to a game of soccer. If Dug’s team wins, his tribe gets to return to their village. If Nooth’s team wins, the whole village will be enslaved and forced to work in mines. Dug goes back to the village to explain the plan. Some of the tribe members are hopeful, but Chief Bobnar (Timoty Spall, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”) isn’t sure the plan is a good idea.
After training for a few days, the village’s only ball is popped during practice, so Dug and his best friend, a hog named Hognob, sneak into the Bronze Age city to steal more balls. During their heist, they run into Goona (Maisie Williams, HBO’s “Game of Thrones”, forthcoming “The New Mutants”), a girl who loves soccer, and is quite good at it, too. Goona isn’t allowed to play on the field because of her gender, but Dug offers her a chance to play on their team. Goona accepts and Dug believes that they have a better chance of winning; still Chief Bobnar is not sure. As the game grows nearer, Dug becomes more and more convinced that playing the game is futile. He worries that he’s sentenced his friends and family to a life of servitude.
In a world predominantly ruled by computer-animated features, it was wonderfully refreshing to see another stop motion picture on screen. I’ve been a fan of every Nick Park movie I’ve seen. I believe the “Wallace and Gromit” movie and short films are modern classics, and “Chicken Run” is a great movie as well. This was the first movie he’s directed in ten years, and while it’s always nice to get something from a director whose work has been consistently charming and humorous, this was probably the weakest of his films I’ve seen.
That being said, this movie is by no means a bad film, it is perfectly average. The story is very paint-by-numbers; by twenty minutes in you can already tell how the film is going to end, and what the didactic themes will be. While I thought some of the jokes were quite funny, many of them fell flat. I saw this in a half-filled theatre with a audience comprised mostly of families with young children, and even the kids didn’t seem to find it very funny. For me, much of the humor in “Wallace and Gromit” and “Chicken Run” came from the underlying jokes aimed more at adults than the kids; those movies were riddled with puns and layered jests. Much of the humor in “Early Man” is much less inspired physical humor; people falling down, getting hit with things, farting, burping, getting stepped on… the list goes on and on. It’s not terrible, but it certainly doesn’t live up to Park’s other films.
But while the humor fell flat, it did look absolutely wonderful. The character designs were fun and varied, the world was vibrantly colorful, and sometimes little gags were worked into the backgrounds (not nearly as often as his previous films). It was the production design and the use of Claymation that brought me to this film, and I walked away happy with both of them. Stop motion films, for me, always have an extra layer of texture to them that other animated films never can replicate. During some scenes in this film you can literally see the artist's fingerprints on the faces of characters. The voice acting from both Hiddleston and Redmayne was pretty great; both were animated and lively. Maisie Williams sometimes sounded fine, and other times it sounded as if she were reading the scene for the very first time.
Verdict:
This film, while slightly disappointing, isn’t a bad movie; it’s charming and lighthearted, but it's themes are well worn, and the story is incredibly predictable. I’m not the movie’s target audience, and maybe the audience I saw it with was just having an off day; maybe your kids will find it funnier than they did. I believe this is one of Park’s more forgettable features, as the script was rather bland, but it is nice to see him on the silver screen again after a decade away. Hopefully we wont have to wait another decade for his next feature.
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