Deep in the bowels of Bristol’s Aztec West studios, Aardman Animations animator Grant Maisey is exhibiting the fruits of a day’s labour. “This is where I’ve got to at the moment,” he says, pressing play on his desktop. A clip shows a small claymation figure striking a gong. It lasts about three or four seconds. “... aaaand that’s a day’s work.” In total, the scene Maisey is filming contains 340 frames – about 14 seconds’ worth – “so that should take me another two days”, he says surprisingly cheerfully.
Such is the lot for an employee at Aardman, a studio seemingly founded to redefine the word “painstaking”. This is the studio, after all, who willingly – or perhaps wilfully – continue to make their films through that most time-sensitive of processes, stop-motion animation, laboriously bringing their creations to life frame-by-frame. Not only that, against all the odds, they have managed to thrive while doing so; Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run and Pirates! are all stop-motion films that have grossed hundreds of millions at the box office, while being hailed by critics and fans. On only a couple of occasions have they succumbed to CGI’s siren song – most notably with the Dreamworks co-production Flushed Away, surely not coincidentally a rare flop for Aardman – but their most recent efforts have returned to the medium that made their name.
Their latest film, Early Man, continues this back-to-basics approach in more ways than one. In fact, you could say it is positively prehistoric. Set in what its opening credits slyly term the neo-Pleistocene age, the film follows a group of plucky stone-agers, led by Dug (Eddie Redmayne), who have their home colonised by the dastardly Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston, adopting a peculiar and very funny pan-European accent) and his Bronze Age, a tribe of aloof technocrats with an unlikely passion for football. The only way for Dug and co to reclaim their land is to beat the Bronze Age at their own beautiful game. We are about to find out what would happen if, as director Nick Park puts it, “cavemen couldn’t swing clubs but instead had to join one”.
Early Man is very much Park’s baby and that’s cause for celebration. It was he, after all, who devised many of Aardman’s most celebrated efforts: Creature Comforts, Wallace and Gromit and, along with company founder Peter Lord, the studio’s biggest hit to date, Chicken Run. Yet he has largely stayed in the background during the company’s most recent decade, producing and writing rather than directing. (The last film he was at the helm of was the 2005 Wallace and Gromit film Curse of the Were-Rabbit.)
For Early Man, though, he’s everywhere – directing, performing (he is responsible for the exaggerated grunts and howls of Dug’s loyal pet swine Hognob) and casting a gimlet eye over every one of the film’s mammoth cast of characters. We get a glimpse of his sense of micromanagement in Aardman’s modelling room, where there sits what the studio’s chief model-maker calls a moodboard of moustaches. There are a dozen in total, each no more than a couple of centimetres wide, each in a different style, from handlebar to horseshoe, and each the product of finely hewn craftsmanship. Only a chosen few have ticks next to them, indicating that they have been deemed worthy of going to the next round of development. There they will be refined further, until Park is happy with the end result. If you think this gruelling X Factor for facial hair would be in service of a major character, you would be mistaken – the moustaches will eventually end up on the upper lips of soldiers, minor and largely wordless players in Early Man, such is Park’s desire to get everything just so.
“Nick designed every character on paper to start with and he’s had them evolving in his head for several years,” explains animation director Will Beecher, who joined the company after sending a letter to Park as a 14-year-old. Beecher’s point is echoed by Redmayne, whose voice work on the film was guided by Park’s cheerful cajoling. “Ninety-nine per cent of our job as actors is trying to get inside Nick’s imagination and rattle around in there,” he says. “He’s one of the warmest, most self-deprecating people I’ve met, but it’s mixed with him knowing absolutely what he wants.”
What Park wanted with Early Man was to tap into his childhood, when he was “crazy about prehistoric life”.
“Way before Jurassic Park, I knew all the names of types of dinosaur,” he says, sitting in an unassuming conference room in Aardman’s similarly unassuming HQ. Early Man was particularly inspired by the work of Ray Harryhausen, the visual effects designer whose jittery stop-motion creatures on Clash of the Titans and One Million Years BC sent a generation of children, including Park, scuttling behind the sofa. “We’ve even got two dinosaurs fighting at the beginning [of Early Man], that we’ve called Ray and Harry as a tribute,” he notes, proudly.
If the prehistoric portion of Early Man’s high-concept premise makes sense given its creator’s dino fanaticism, it is slightly less clear how football became part of the equation. Park doesn’t really follow the game, aside from watching the odd World Cup match. “I had a Preston North End bag when I was at school, but I never went to a match,” he admits, before adding hopefully: “I think it maybe gives me an outsider’s view on football.”
Not that you would notice from the finished product. Early Man is that rare thing: a football film that doesn’t get bogged down by pandering or cliche. Mark Burnton, who wrote the script, also wrote Mike Bassett: England Manager. There are sight gags around glass-fronted corporate boxes and Adidas Predator-style boots made from giant centipedes, as well as an on-point Alan Hansen impression from Rob Brydon. And, of course, there’s the film’s overarching storyline – plucky natives seek to stick it to the preening continentals – which has more than a ring of the England national team about it, especially when it becomes clear that the stone agers were playing the game long before their bronze cousins.
But wait, might that theme of taking back control from them foreigners not have unfortunate connotations post-Brexit? Aardman’s protracted production schedule means that work had begun on Early Man long before the EU referendum had been settled, and Park argues that its subject matter is less about European politics and “more about corruption in football and the loss of the spirit of the game”. Yet the company were still conscious of being seen as “flying the wrong flag”. The concern was so pronounced that at one point, the studio even had Hiddleston do an English accent just to take the sting out of any perceived anti-Brexit sentiment. But, says Park: “It was just funnier as a ‘French’ accent. And even [the film’s French co-financiers] StudioCanal said: ‘Oh it’s a pity you lost the French accent.’ So we changed it back again.”
In the end, you suspect they needn’t have worried. Early Man has an overarching message that it’s better to look outwards than in, to collaborate rather than go it alone. Crucial to the stone agers’ success, for example, is the expert coaching by Goona, a bronze ager played with an accent situated somewhere between Norwegian and Geordie by Game of Thrones’s Maisie Williams. Moveover, it takes as many archeological digs at the backwards Brits as it does the snooty Europeans. But then again, Aardman has never really been about taking digs anyway – its humour is affectionate rather than acrid, what Redmayne calls “a mixture of something that’s childlike in its wonder, but super-sophisticated in its observation. They make it appear effortless.”
Of course, the moodboard of moustaches and extended shoots is testament to how Aardman’s work is a lot harder than it looks, and the protracted process of putting together a feature film has taken its strain on Park in particular. “I’d like to something short next time, just to free my mind a bit,” he says. There’s one obvious contender. “I miss Wallace and Gromit,” he says. “Obviously, it’s difficult with the loss of Peter Sallis” – the Last of the Summer Wine actor and voice of Wallace, who died last year – “but I think Peter would have liked them to carry on. So we’ll find someone.”
Aardman, you suspect, will keep powering on, too, one carefully positioned claymation figure at a time.
