There is a valley where prehistoric beings live. All they do is hunt rabbits and that’s it. Dug, who is the youngest of the tribe, feels they can hunt bigger and better things like an elephant. Lord Nooth, a man from the Bronze valley, invades the caveman valley with his army and they take over. Dug falls into one of their baskets. He is taken to the Bronze valley where he discovers the sport of football (England’s way of saying soccer). The cavemen's ancestors used to play it back in prehistoric times. Dug challenges the Bronze to a football game in order to reclaim their valley. Goona, a vendor from the Bronze valley, helps teach the cavemen how to play football. The more the cavemen practice the sport, the more they love it.
Blaine: Nick Park is the reason Aardman studios has become a successful company. His style in animation has become an inspiration for tons of people. In 2013, Nick was thinking about doing a movie about sport and then he thought about prehistoric beings creating football. It started off taking place in just prehistoric times, but then Nick thought about adding the Bronze times to the story as well. Nick had a lot of ideas and did drawings of the characters. It’s always a challenge for Nick to create new characters. The model makers looked at Nick’s drawings and sculpted these clay figures and then they went right into making the puppets. Everyone has a job in making a stop motion puppet. They sculpt the puppets, make the fabrics and add color to the puppets by painting them. Inside these puppets are joints that help them move whenever the animator is changing the puppets position for a shot…….stop motion is a physical thing.
For the past two years, the animators would record videos of themselves showing expressions and movements as a test to see how the characters should move in the film. Nick Park would act goofy a lot while performing. “Early Man” required more to it than any other movie Aardman has made in the past. Nick Park realized that he had gone over his head with “Early Man”. Nick wanted football to be the main subject of the film, but he didn’t realize how much work was going to have to be put into the stop motion. He didn’t think it was even possible to do football in stop motion. But everyone managed to make it work. There were 35 animators working on this project.
“Early Man” also required huge sets, like the caveman landscape looks so much like a real forest. There’s thousands of background puppets. And there’s the football stadium. These sets were built on five stages. Nick Park has become an inspiration for stop motion animation to a lot of actors. They love the characters Nick has created, they really get into these adventures he comes up with and they love the humor he has added to the story. A lot of actors want to do the voices of his characters. It was a treat for both Eddie Redmayne and Maisie Williams to visit Aardman studios to see the sets, the puppets and see how everything is done in stop motion animation. Tom Hiddleston loved “Wallace & Gromit” when he was a kid and when he was offered to do the voice of one of Nick Park’s new characters he was very honored. Nick Park would make Tom laugh so hard in the recording booth that he needed to step out for a minute because it was hard for him to laugh and breath at the same time. Recording booths can be hard to breath in because it’s a small space and the actor is using all of his or her breath to say the dialog several times. Tom never played a character that is as silly as Lord Nooth before, but when he looked at Nick’s drawings of the character, it helped him think about how this character might sound.
Everyone knows Maisie Williams for her work in “Game of Thrones” and Nick is aware how talented she is and there was no one else he wanted to do the voice of Goona than Maisie. Maisie didn’t care if she would get a small or big part in “Early Man” because she’s a huge fan of Nick Park’s work. Nick wanted a Scandinavian (Northern Europe) accent for Goona, so Maisie played around with her voice and asked Nick what he preferred. Goona wants to be a football player, but she can’t because she’s a woman. But she has had a lot of practice and after Dug sees how wonderful she is, he not only asks for her help to coach the cavemen, but to be a member of their team. Dug treats Goona like an equal and an athlete. Timothy Spall did the voice of one of the rats in “Chicken Run” and Nick thought about him doing the voice of the leader of the cavemen, Chief Bobnar. Chief Bobnar is not big on trying new things at first. He just wants the tribe to hunt rabbits. But after practicing for the football tournament he has an exciting new feeling inside him. And Dug has become an inspiration for him now that the tribe is trying out something new with their lives.
When you make an animated feature, the actors are in different recording booths, but some directors like having the actors be in the same booth so they can interact with each other while doing the voice. Maisie and Eddie would read their scenes together and Nick would be in the booth with them. Nick Park would always be in the recording booth with an actor to explain how the tone of their voice should sound, what they are reacting to and what noises they should be making like screaming. Everyone would have fun in the recording booths because they were acting goofy. Nick Park did the voice of one of his characters, Hognob, Dug’s pet hog. Hognob doesn’t have any dialog, but he expresses himself through his expressions and the noises he makes.
My rating on “Early Man” is five out of five stars
