In my quest to absorb as much information about Aardman as possible, I was reminded of a conversation I had with a friend. He told me about a theory he’d read that the film Early Man is indirectly about Brexit. I looked into this and found Steve Rose’s article on the topic in the Guardian.
Rose’s article brings up the Brexit allegory as something incidentally humourous, but the main function of the article is to serve as a review of the film. Rose talks about how the film focuses on “an insular, small-minded tribe who live in a giant crater, cut off from the outside world”, who find themselves under threat by the Bronze age, who’s society is “a melting pot of continental accents and influences – a sort of European, er, union, you could say.” (Rose, 2018). The bronze age characters are in thrall to football, a sport which the main character Dug later discovers via cave painting was invented by his own tribe. However, he also learns that his tribe gave up playing it, as every other tribe who adopted the sport was far superior to them. Eventually, the British stone age team are able to defeat the European bronze age team and win back their village, and the leader of the bronze age team is arrested for trying to steal the game’s admission money.
In his article, Rose talks about how Early Man plays off Eurosceptic anxieties brought to the front of the public consciousness by Brexit. The stone age village is under legitimate threat of invasion by the bronze age civilisation, who roll up with armoured elephants to absorb their land into their conglomerate. Add to this the fact that they are “fighting to “take back control” by reconnecting with their past, you could say.” (Rose, 2018), and this film lends itself very easily to a Brexit reading.
However, these arguments were undermined by Nick Park himself, in response to the article. He’s quoted as saying “Well, we started filming before Brexit… when Brexit happened we suddenly thought… I didn’t want the film to become a sort of ‘flying the flag’ for any kind of extreme nationalism” (RTE, 2018). He goes on to elaborate that football ends up being a tool to bring about peace, and the cavemen in the story get their village back but they have to learn to adapt to the ways of the bronze age.
I bring this up because I found the reading of a strong political message from this otherwise very sweet film quite entertaining. If it does tap into euroscepticism, it does so to make fun of the British as much as Europe. It was, in the end, largely irrelevant to my presentation about how Aardman portrays the North of England, so here it is instead.
Bibliography
Rose, S. (2018). Early Man review – Aardman claymation comedy brings Brexit to the bronze age. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/jan/14/early-man-review-aardman-animations [Accessed 25 Feb. 2025].
RTE. (2018) Early Man ‘not about Brexit’, says Wallace and Gromit creator [online] RTE.ie. Available at: https://www.rte.ie/entertainment/2018/0127/936297-early-man-brexit/ [Accessed 25 Feb. 2025].
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