‘Early Man’ isn’t anything new, but still fun

Posted on March 2, 2018

By MARK VIOLA

Stop-motion animation is a dying art form. There really are only two studios still regularly making films employing stop-motion, Laika in the U.S., which uses models and puppets for their work in such films as “Coraline” and “Kubo and the Two Strings,” and Aardman Animations in England, which uses claymation in their movies, including “Chicken Run” and “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” As a fan of animation in general, I’m happy to see both studios keeping the old ways alive.

Aardman’s latest film, “Early Man,” is a family comedy about a group of cavemen who are forced to play a game of soccer in order to save their valley from a group of pillaging Bronze Age bullies. Like most of Aardman’s works, this film is very British, and it follows the very tried and true formula found in many sports movies in which a group of plucky losers must take on the champions with a lot of personal consequences at stake.

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