EARLY MAN : A PLASTICINE ERA COMEDY

I guess it makes sense that a film about the Pleistocene era should be populated with creatures made of Plasticine.

Aardman animation has shorn itself of sheep and retired Wallace and Gromit to go back in time and stir the primordial soup with EARLY MAN.

It’s a film about tribalism so it makes sense it’s not really a prehistorically correct epic of the epoch but about football and the origins of the beautiful game.

A tribe of rabbit hunters habitat an herbaceous valley where they lead an Eden like existence.

But every Eden has its serpent and that comes in the form of Lord Nooth, a Bronze age mining magnate who wants to call the valley “MINE!”

Nooth is also manager of a Bronzed champion football team, and the valley dwellers invite a match between the seasoned champions and the novice Neanderthals with the valley as spoils to the victor.

As you would imagine, coming from the Aardman cave of creative chaos, this is a deliriously deft and daft draughty ditty, slick and thick with pictorial and verbal puns.

EARLY MAN boasts an excellent voice cast led by Eddie Redmayne as the courageous caveman, Dug. Can you dig it? Tom Hiddleston voices the ghastly Gallic, Lord Nooth.

The venerable Timothy Spall plays Dug’s chief Bobnar and Maisie Williams plays Goona, a girl who displays fantastic feats of football.

Comedian-impressionist Rob Brydon does double duty, voicing both the TV commentators at the Bronze Age football matches; they’re inspired by real-life soccer pundits John Motson and Alan Hansen and also the Message Bird, mimicking the voice of Queen Oofeefa, who in turn is played by Miriam Margolyes. Good golly Miss Margolyes!

With cricket on the nose, an origins of football film is just the ticket. No balls were tampered with during the making of this film but bellies will be subjected to laughs watching it.