‘If they don’t do it right, you can just squash their heads in!’

Right – let’s get the really bad jokes out of the way before we go any further. A product of the Plasticine era, Nick Park’s Early Man is a truly mammoth production. Facts? We gottem, courtesy of Aardman’s ever-assiduous statistics department. Park’s first film as director since 2005’s Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is the biggest project in the great Bristol animation studio’s 40 year history. Between May 2016 and December 2017, Aardman’s 51,000 sq ft Aztec West studio (the size of four Olympic swimming pools, this being the standard unit of area for anything smaller than the size of Wales) was packed with up to 40 units working simultaneously.

Animator Steve Cox brings the tribe to life

Some 150 people were involved with the production. The film required 273 puppets, made by 23 different modelmakers over a 30-month period. At its peak, 33 animators were beavering away to bring to life these distinctively toothy characters (in the world of Aardman, even birds have gnashers). The big centrepiece was a giant Bronze Age city, complete with a huge stadium – all scaled down to miniature size.

The spectacular Bronze Age town approach

Although the production itself took around 18 months, Park has been working on Early Man since 2010, writing and re-writing scenes and preparing storyboards in typical meticulous Aardman style. Curiously, this means there was some overlap with fellow caveman animation The Croods, which was originally an Aardman project but reverted to DreamWorks following the Bristol studio’s divorce from the US giant. It’s a pleasure to report that Early Man is a much better film.

Eddie Redmayne, Maisie Williams and Nick Park with their respective characters: Dug, Goona and Hognob

Park can be forgiven for looking a little exhausted at the Cinema De Lux’s Bristol charity premiere, in aid of the Grand Appeal, where TV crews line up to ask him the same questions in a slightly different order before he’s thrown to the jackals of the print media. It must be an odd feeling to finally release into the wild a film on which you’ve toiled for the best part of eight years. “It’s hard to live with jokes that you thought up around the coffee table four or five years ago,” he laughs. “I’m terrible – I start to edit my own jokes. You’re working with all these technicians on the sound and no one’s laughing. You’re thinking, why isn’t it funny any more? So it’s a great relief to finally show it to the public. That’s true with every film really. This was shown yesterday in London to a really rapturous audience at the BFI – you know, the fee-paying public – so that was really encouraging.”

Maisie Williams with Goona

Joining him on the ‘green carpet’ is Bristol-born Maisie Williams, who’s flown in for the day from the set of the eighth and final season of Game of Thrones in Ireland. “It’s so nice to be back,” she enthuses. “All of my friends and family are here. About a month before we started recording, I moved to London because I was always working there. And then I got my first job here. So it’s really nice to share this world with all my friends and family and the people that I love.”

Supervising Set Dresser Andy Brown adjusts some of the props on the badlands set

It’s safe to say that Williams is up for a challenge. In addition to her ongoing role as Arya Stark in Game of Thrones, she gave a justly award-winning performance in Carol Morley’s The Falling and starred in C4’s Cyberbully, which tackled an issue close to her heart. Next year, we’ll see her doing the superhero thing in the 13th X-Men movie, The New Mutants, in which she comes over all hairy as the shape-shifting Wolfsbane. In Early Man, she voices the character of Goona – a suitably tomboyish teenager whose footballing skills prove invaluable to a tribe of dumbass stone age knuckle-draggers in their big match against dastardly Bronze Agers. “I’ve always been very interested in doing animation,” she reveals. “It was a huge challenge. There were lessons that I learnt on this that I will now take with me when I’m approaching any other role – just skills that I wasn’t too familiar with. But if you can have a good time doing a job and also be challenging yourself then that’s ideal.”

Some early design sculpts of the Early Man Characters

So was her casting a deliberate attempt to shoehorn another Bristolian into the project, or was that just the icing on the cake? “We weren’t really thinking of Bristol, to be honest,” laughs Park. “What’s really good is to have the track record to be able to call up anybody’s agent and ask. Maisie was just top of the list in terms of who I was after for the part. I was really lucky that she was able to say yes.”

It’s notable that all three of the main voice cast – completed by Eddie Redmayne as heroic caveman Dug and Tom Hiddleston as outrageously accented baddie Lord Nooth – had never done voice work before. Was the director at all nervous about this? “Yeah, I was. I’m always nervous working with real actors. I’m used to working with plasticine. If they don’t do it right, you can squash them. You can just squash their heads in. But I must say, I’ve enjoyed working with Maisie and the other actors probably more than ever – maybe because I now feel a bit more confident. It’s great having actors like Maisie, who contribute all sorts of ideas.”

Hognob gets ready for his close-up

There been no great song and dance about it, but if you scan the film’s credits closely you’ll notice that Nick Park voices a character other than himself (he had a cameo in the Shaun the Sheep Movie, remember?) for the very first time. Yep, the grunting, snuffling and howling of Dug’s porcine sidekick Hognob is all his own work. “It was accidental,” he confesses. “We put the film together on storyboards with a scratch track. I was doing it just so I could see the shape of the scenes and the timing. I was doing Hognob all the time. The editor and the producer just said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ I was going to cast somebody, but I became Hognob. I evolved into Hognob…”

Early Man opens at cinemas everywhere on January 26. See our listing here for details. Go here for our full review.