By If you’ve been craving British humor filtered through the wonderful art of claymation, Nick Park is once again here to bail you out – he’s directing a new movie, Early Man, and the first image from the film has been released. The movie from the creator of Wallace & Gromit and Shaun the Sheep is a partnership between Aardman Studios and Studiocanal, two of Europe’s first-class animation studios.
The still doesn’t offer much except that, as the title suggests, the movie appears to be about cave men in prehistoric times. People familiar with Park’s work will recognize some blatant references to some of his most well-known works in the cave paintings; you’ve got Wallace and Gromit in the upper left, Shaun the Sheep in the upper right, and characters from Chicken Run at the bottom. It seems unlikely that any of those characters will play a major role in the movie, but it is a cute little reference to Early Man‘s evolutionary line, so to speak.
Early reports from Cannes suggest Early Man will focus on the world’s first soccer match, and the Studiocanal aims to release the film ahead of the 2018 World Cup. That’s not evident in the still, but check it out below anyway.