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Director: Nick Park
Release date: January 20, 2018
Rating: ★★
Review:
In ‘Early Man’ some cavemen have to play a soccer match to save their village from oblivion. ‘Early Man’ was Aardman’s seventh feature film, and the fifth using the studio’s trademark Claymation, but when compared to the wonderful movies ‘Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit’ (2005) or ‘Shaun the Sheep Movie’ (2015) ‘Early Man’ is frustratingly lackluster.
Sure, the film is wonderfully made, and clearly with a lot of love, and has the charm of fingerprints being visible on the clay puppets. Moreover, by now, the Aardman studio clearly makes its animation style look easy. Then there are the typical Aardman quirks, like the way replays are shown, or some funny side remarks, the best of which is “Sliced bread? That’s the best thing since… well, ever!”. I particularly liked the idea of the message bird, which not only repeats all that is said to him, but all the accompanying actions, as well. These little touches at times made me laugh out loud.
Unfortunately, the story is not half as good: it’s one long sum of cliches, never venturing into new or surprising story ideas, making the film surprisingly dull. Especially, the football match ticks all the familiar boxes of the sports film, and there are team effort scenes and unconventional training scheme scenes as we had seen already a thousand times, most recently in ‘Kung Fu Panda 3’ (2016) and ‘Cars 3’ (2017), which were both also frustrating affairs story-wise. The characters, too, are in no sense original, and feel emblematical, instead of rounded. Even the main hero Dug is appallingly onedimensional.
As said, ‘Early Man’ especially follows the sports film trope of the underdog winning against all odds but it does so in the laziest way. For example, at one point Goona makes clear to the cavemen that they may have a chance because they can be a team while their opponents are just a bunch of individuals. Now, there’s a chance to make the cavemen’s win believable. And what is done with this idea? Absolutely nothing. As soon as the real match starts, the so-called big difference between the behavior of the star players and the cavemen team on the field disappears. It’s disheartening to watch this saving element being left unused.
The world-building, too, leaves a lot to be desired. ‘Early Man’ doesn’t really play in the stone age, or the bronze age, or whatever. It is set in some fantasy sword-and-sorcery world with bare rocks and active volcanoes. Even the time period of the prologue makes no sense, set in the non-existing ‘Neo-Pleistocene’ and showing us cavemen living next to dinosaurs (in a nice little nod to Willis O’Brien, although the two creatures were apparently called Ray and Harry after that other great stop motion monster animator, Ray Harryhausen).
By the time the main story starts, the dinosaurs have disappeared, but some Flintstones-like gags remain, like little crocodiles as clothespins and a beetle as an electric razor. But then the studio adds some creatures that in no world make any sense whatsoever, like a giant woodlouse, a giant spider, a giant duck with teeth and some giant caterpillars. With these the film makers lost all consistency and believability of a world that was rather shaky to start with.
For example, the only green spot in this world is where ages ago a meteorite struck, but it’s in this world the cavemen live. How the other people survived in the highly hostile environment of the rest of the planet remains an utter mystery. It doesn’t help that most of this world is rendered in the ugliest and laziest computer animation, which contrasts greatly with the fine Claymation.
It seems the film makers too much wanted to make a football (soccer) movie, and got blind for the film’s flaws, which are instantly recognizable to any viewer. Instead, they should have thought things over, both about their story and their world, because the final film is a formulaic drag, and, not surprisingly, became a box office bomb.
Watch the trailer for ‘Early Man’ yourself and tell me what you think:
Director: Chuck Jones
Release Date: April 22, 1939
Rating: ★★★
Review:
After directing four films with stars of his own, fledgling director Chuck Jones first directed a major Warner Bros. Star in ‘Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur’.
Jones does a fairly good job in trying to capture the wacky spirit of contemporary cartoons by Tex Avery and Bob Clampett, although his animation is more Disney-like than that of his peers.
Daffy’s adversary is a grumpy caveman called Caspar, whose surprisingly elaborate design and voice anticipate Elmer Fudd a little. The dinosaur of the title is called Fido. He is the caveman’s pet, and a large brontosaur. However, the dinosaur hardly comes into action, and most of the comedy is between the duck and the caveman.
There are some nice gags, but highlight is the non-animated gag of an enormous string of billboards leading to a duck dinner. Jones is still uncertain with Daffy as a character, but let’s be fair, so was even Tex Avery himself at this point – and he invented the duck. Jones’s caveman in fact is a better opponent to Daffy than Avery’s Egghead was. However, only with his third Daffy Duck film, ‘My Favorite Duck‘ (1942), Jones directed the character to great comic effect.
Watch ‘Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur’ yourself and tell me what you think:
This is Daffy Duck cartoon No. 6
To the previous Daffy Duck cartoon: Daffy Duck in Hollywood
To the next Daffy Duck cartoon: Scalp Trouble
‘Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur’ is available on the DVD-set ‘Looney Tunes Golden Collection: Volume 3’
Dr. Grob's Animation Review 