Producer-Director: Nick Park – 2018 – UK – Cert. PG – 89m
*****
Ancient caveman Brits, rabbits, mammoths, dinosaurs, dastardly Frenchmen and football – Aardman’s prehistoric, stop-frame marvel is back out in UK cinemas on Friday, 21st August
Nick Park and Aardman Animations’ epic is set in a prehistoric world of cavemen, rabbits and mammoths. For good measure it also throws in dastardly Frenchmen and football. Park coaxes great voice performances out of his all-star cast, while physical animation is in the capable hands of Will Becher (who directed the Creature Comforts TV series) and Merlin Crossingham (Creative Director for Wallace & Gromit since 2009 and subsequently co-director with Park of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, 2024).
At one point a mallard appears in the distance. A caveman hurls a small rock at it. The rock travels an awful long way. Much farther than we expected. Eventually it reaches the mallard, revealed as a gargantuan beast on the scale of a dinosaur. The giant mallard charges towards us and the hapless tribe of cavemen.
This is very much in the spirit of Early Man’s opening sequence wherein volcanoes belch fire and a carnivorous ceratosaurus does battle with a herbivorous triceratops clearly modelled on their counterparts in Ray Harryhausen’s One Million Years B.C. (Don Chaffey, 1966). Harryhausen made a career out of inserting memorable monsters and other creatures into a series of extraordinary, otherwise live-action fantasy and mythological movies via camera trickery and special effects. Park describes him as “the King of Stop-Frame Animation” and acknowledges him here by naming one dinosaur Ray and the other Harry in the end credits.
Not that Ray and Harry get long on the screen. As an asteroid… [Read the rest at All the Anime.]
Early Man is back out in UK cinemas on Friday, 21st August 2026.
Teaser Trailer:
Trailer: