I'm not sure that it's their best effort though.
Maybe that's partly because this is the first time time Nick Park has been solo in the director's chair, maybe it's because it's mostly a movie about soccer. I don't know.
Don't get me wrong, it's a fun movie, and very much in the Aardman oeuvre... it just didn't wow me.
I do wonder how well it will go over in America to be honest... even compared to the Wallace and Grommit movies, this feels the most English of all their features for some reason.
Standing in as the Jurassic versions of Wallace and Grommit we have Dug and Hobnog, a boy and his boar (sabretoothed pig?), part of a tribe of, well, idiots to be honest. And their simple life is interrupted by the coming of the Bronze Age, in the form of a whole civilisation who uses bronze for everything, worship soccer and seem to be quite a bit French, before French was invented.
Eddie Redmayne voices Dug, while Parks provides the pig noises for Hobnob... and Tom Hiddleston is Lord Nooth, ruler of the city. But there's also a queen, who rules over... I'm not sure... everything else?
A number of English comedians lend their voices to Dug's tribe and Maisie Williams appears in the role that's usually the love interest but isn't in this movie for some reason. And her character, Goona, looks like a very early ancestor of Lady Tottington from the Wallace and Grommit wererabbit movie.
There are fun moments, the story isn't bad and on the whole it looks great. On a few occasions it did seem more obvious than usual that characters were against a greenscreen rather than being in the environment, which is understandable when they're crowd scenes, but was still a little jarring.
So, yeah... good, not great.
yani's rating: 3 stone footballs out of 5
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