AnimationWorld Magazine — February 17, 2018
A Team Effort: Bringing Aardman’s ‘Early Man’ to the Big Screen

Twelve years in the making, Aardman’s Early Man is a Claymation sports comedy hidden within a caveman comedy, providing nearly 90 minutes of family-friendly sight-gags and silly puns acted out by adorably funny-looking characters. The stop-motion animated feature from Aardman Animations was released in the U.K. on January 26, and is now playing in U.S. theaters from distributor Lionsgate.

In this first solo feature from four-time Oscar-winning director Nick Park, our heroes are a Stone Age tribe living out a modest hunter-gatherer existence in a fertile valley somewhere near the future site of Manchester. The group is seemingly unaware that the Bronze Age is already underway until a slightly more advanced civilization moves in to colonize their valley and banishes them to the wasteland. Dug, voiced by Eddie Redmayne, discovers that the Bronze Age city-dwellers are devoted to the game of football — “soccer,” as we call it stateside — and decides to teach his fellow tribesmen to play the game in order to challenge the Bronze Age villains for the rights to their land.

Dug faces off against the pompous, money-hungry Lord Nooth (voiced by Tom Hiddleston with a goofy French accent) alongside his stalwart sidekick Hognob (Park) and the spirited Goona (Maisie Williams), rallying his tribe to compete in a match against the Bronze Age team, Real Bronzio.

Written by Park, Mark Burton and James Higginson, Early Man had been in development at Aardman Animations since 2010, beginning with the director’s doodles and initial story ideas. Writing and storyboarding took about four years, and animation production — begun in May 2016 — was completed in the final weeks of 2017.

Roughly 150 people were directly involved with the making of Early Man, with 33 animators working on the film at the peak of production. Early Man employed 273 puppets, made by 23 different modelmakers over a 30-month timespan. Each individual puppet was created over a period of more than 10 weeks, with the model making team completing a total of 18 Dug puppets, and eight of each member of the Stone Age tribe. A total of 3,000 interchangeable mouths were crafted for the film’s characters by hand. For the sets, Aardman’s art department made 60 trees for the Stone Age tribe’s forest — each one taking about a week to complete.

(Read more at AnimationWorld Magazine…)