EARLY MAN (PG)

Rating: Three stars (3 out of 5)

Director: Nick Park

Starring: Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams

Running time: 89 minutes

Caveman comedy keeps its eye on the ball

Oscar-winning British animator Nick Park (Wallace and Gromit) explores the evolution of soccer in his latest comedy, set loosely around the dawn of the Bronze Age.

Lionel Messi will be gobsmacked to learn that the game he dominates originated 66 million years ago on the final day of the Mesozoic era.

Scientists will be equally stunned by Early Man’s revelation that the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs at that time actually smacked down just outside of Manchester.

And Aardman enthusiasts and English football fans alike will get a chuckle out of the birth of Caveman United — a delightful piece of physical stop-motion comedy that involves a bunch of Neanderthals and a still-smouldering asteroid crumb.

The humour in this sweet-natured, old-school British comedy can be traced all the way back to the Stone Age, although its proto-feminist foil and romantic interest Goona (Game Of Thrones’ Maisie Williams) is a thoroughly modern addition.

In contrast to the quick-witted dialogue favoured by contemporary American animaters, Early Man’s protagonists have barely mastered even basic language.

They’re several clubs short of the full plunder.

Young Dug (Eddie Redmayne) is the aberration. Keen to test the limits, he wants to progress from hunting rabbits to hunting woolly mammoths, for example.

Chief Bobnar (Timothy Spall), however, is conservative to the point of backwardness — which might explain why this small tribe has been left so far behind their Bronze Age contemporaries.

When the army of the rapacious Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston) invades their lush, protected valley, the dimwitted cavemen and women are forced out into the badlands, a desolate landscape littered with dinosaur bones and strange, super-sized creatures, such as a giant, waddling duck.

Becoming separated from his tribe, Dug follows the raiders back to their opulent, walled city where he literally stumbles upon the occupants’ beloved game of soccer.

Before a packed stadium, Dug challenges Lord Nooth’s elite team to a match.

If Dug and his team win, they get their valley back. But if they lose, they are destined to a life of backbreaking labour in Lord Nooth’s mine.

What follows is fairly conventional underdog sports story in which team spirit is the only weapon, apart from the aforementioned Goona, a would-be soccer star who has been locked out of the competition on account of her gender.

Wallace’s secret weapon was Grommit. Dug’s speechless sidekick in the latest Ardman adventure is a warthog named Hognog who wheezes, grunts, howls ... and ultimately saves the day.

In a cinematic landscape that favours wisecracking motormouths and polished but increasingly generic CGI, Early Man’s sweet-natured slapstick and endearingly “primitive” look feel like a welcome counterbalance.

Early Man is now screening in Queensland and Victoria and opens in other states on Thursday (April 12).