EARLY MAN

EARLY MAN (vt variations in different languages on "[The] Cave Man").[1] Nick Park, dir., co-story with Mark Burton, one of five credited producers. Mark Burton and James Higginson, script. Matt Perry, production design. USA/UK/France: Aardman Animations, StudioCanal (production) / Lionsgate (US distribution), 2018. For international distribution, see IMDb.[2]

Comic animation, giving the appearance of classic Claymation until one gets to crowd scenes and the credits, indicating CGI and other high-tech production. Basically a sports film about a football game — as in futbol or fútbol, soccer — between a Bronze-Age city near where Manchester, UK, would develop[3] and its surrounding Stone Age neighbors.

During the Agricultural Revolution, some groups left folkways of pastoralism, gardening, and the hunter-gatherer life to go into large-scale farming and the formation of cities, eventually using bronze rather than stone for tools and weapons, developing division of labor and hierarchies, and for good and ill creating civilization. EARLY MAN plays with that history, having a group of hunting — only — "cave men," living in a valley and getting displace by their city-dwelling neighbors and their cutting-edge technology. The City-dwellers — it's time to capitalize "City" as a visual and narrative representation — want the land of the "cave men" and, as the plot develops, the cave men and women to work in the City's metal mines. Significant here for the City's technology, especially tank-like weapons that look like very large bronze Daleks[4] interbred with Teutonic Knights from ALEXANDER NEVSKY, with a bit of Viking and Spartan thrown in.[5] If we picture wooly mammoths under the armor, we have the superimposition of the Bronze-Age-technological upon the Elephantine. The soccer balls used are like modern soccer balls, introducing a hexagon motif,[6] which is picked up in other comically-rendered imagined Bronze-age technology and decoration.

We see food in the City but nothing of its agriculture, while the hunters are ineffective in their hunt for rabbit and never move up to mammoth — early on in the film, the dream of the hero — but are associated with nature vs. the human-made City and its war machines and other devices, hierarchy, and competition between rule by a Queen and rule by a male proto-bureaucrat (the Queen wins).

RDE, Initial Compiler, 24Feb18