Early Man (Dir Nick Park, 1h 20m)

Films about football, and indeed about sport in general, are a mixed bag. Some focus too much on the sport, in almost excruciating detail, whilst others use the sport as wallpaper for greater drama. And there are the films, from Shaolin Soccer to Bend it Like Beckham, that perfectly mix their love of football with their topic. Early Man is, in the strangest of ways, one of those films; telling the story of a tribe of caveman, headed by Dug (a likable turn from Eddie Redmayne, who once again puts on a "likable fish out of water" performance that only he could make quite as empathetic),  turfed out of their valley by french speaking, bronze-age humans, it then promptly takes a brilliantly bananas left turn into the sort of good natured eccentricity that we've come to love from Nick Park.

Having strayed into the realm of the Bronze Age Francophones, via colossal mammoth (one of many spectacularly large models made for this film, another being an enjoyably terrifying, and brilliantly Aardman giant duck) Dug then comes face to face with the Bronze Age's favourite sport...football. It's fair to say that the bronze age takes football very very seriously indeed, with Tom Hiddleston (barely recognisable beneath an amusingly cod french accent, but playing up his comic side)'s Lord Nooth's team, Real Bronzio being nigh unbeatable. Here as ever, Park's observational humour is pitch perfect-Bronzio are a team of individuals, from diving primadonnas to infamous tacklers, and it doesn't take a a great jump of logic to guess which Spanish football club Park has in mind-with Dug disguising himself as the goalkeeper and then revealed to be, well, a caveman (to the gasps of the stadium).

Whilst Nooth first sends off Dug to be executed "slowly", leading to one of the best gags in the entire film, Dug comes up with another solution-their cavemen team will play Real Bronzio for their beloved home in the valley; win, and they reclaim their valley, lose and they spend their life in the mines. Thus, football in hand, and with a realisation that the cave paintings around their valley tell an illustrious story of their invention and prowess in football, Dug attempts to coerce his tribe into playing the game. However, when the aforementioned giant duck-which, seriously may be one of the funniest and most unexpected things that Park has ever animated, from its unexpected scale to the fact that it still quacks, well, like a duck-crushes their solitary ball, so the plucky Dug is off, despite the reservations of the tribe's leader, in search of more balls. Here, he meets up with Goona (another football reference, of course, played by Maisie Williams), who first rescues him from the Bronze City, and then begins to teach his team how to play football. The denouement is too good to give away here, but it's everything you could want from a Nick Park film, from a thrilling-and extremely funny- finale of a football match, to an unabashed homage to England's victory at the 1966 World Cup.

Early Man, thus, is an almost perfect film-it may be heresy to say it, but compared to Curse of the Wererabbit, Park's big-screen outing for the beloved Wallace And Gromit, it's a better paced, bigger, and less constrained film-the gags come thick and fast, so much so that this film is a must-buy if only to catch the details the second-or third-time round, there's an older, slightly more knowing element to the film, and for all its footballing paraphernalia, it's a simple and effective story about teamwork. With it, Park not only adds another great footballing film to the team, but further cements Nick Park as one of the greatest animators of all time.

Rating: Must-See