THERE MAY BE NO GREATER ACT OF obsessive movie love than making a stop motion animated film, and Nick Park, director of the marvelous Wallace and Gromit films and a co-director of the flying-the-coop coup Chicken Run, has given us some of the best. The expressiveness of his characters—poultry suffering from existential anxiety, cranky dogs passing silent judgment on the idiocy of humankind— speaks volumes about the human condition, though always with a wink.
Park’s latest, Early Man, isn’t always as mischievously delightful as those earlier films, but its breezy, generous spirit counts for plenty. Eddie Redmayne is the voice of Dug, a goofy kid from Stone Age England who helps his small, bumbling tribe fend off the nakedly colonialist Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston), a snooty French Bronze Age…