Early Man

Early Man is a 2018 stop motion animated sports comedy film directed by Nick Park, the creator of Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts, Chicken Run, and Shaun the Sheep, written by Mark Burton and James Higginson, and starring the voices of Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams, and Timothy Spall. The film follows a tribe of primitive Stone Age valley dwellers who have to defend their land from bronze-using invaders in a football match. The film premiered on 20 January 2018 at the BFI Southbank cinema. Released theatrically on 26 January 2018 (in the UK), the film received generally positive reviews from critics, with praise for the visuals and humor, although it was considered inferior to previous Aardman works. However, it was a box-office bomb, grossing just $54 million against a budget of $50 million, making it the lowest-grossing Aardman film since Flushed Away. It was also the final Aardman film to be released theatrically in the United States as Netflix acquired streaming rights to further Aardman films in late 2019. Plot In 2 million B.C. during the Neo-Pleistocene era, an asteroid collides with Earth "near Manchester", causing the extinction of the planet's dinosaurs, but sparing a tribe of cavemen living near the impact site. Finding a roughly spherical chunk of the asteroid, the cavemen begin to kick it around because it is too hot to hold and invent the game of football. "Several eras" later during the Stone Age, the impact site has become a lush valley, inhabited by a tribe of cavemen, including Dug and his pet boar Hognob. One day, Dug suggests to Chief Bobnar that they should try hunting mammoths instead of rabbits as they always do, but Bobnar brushes him off, insisting the uncoordinated tribe would be unable to catch mammoths. An army led by Lord Nooth, a Bronze Age governor, drives the tribe out of the valley and into the surrounding volcanic badlands. Dug tries to attack them, but falls into a cart and is unknowingly taken to the Bronze Age city. There, he is mistaken for a football player. To escape, he challenges Nooth's elite local team to a match with the valley at stake and promises that the tribe will work in Nooth's mines forever if they lose. Nooth accepts, knowing that he can profit from the match. Dug discovers that although his ancestors played football, the other members of his tribe are too dim to understand it. They get chased by a giant duck that destroys their only ball.