Dir: Nick Park. Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Tom Hiddleston, Maisie Williams, Timothy Spall, Miriam Margolyes, Rob Brydon, Kayvan Novak, Gina Yashere, Richard Ayoade, Johnny Vegas (voices). PG cert, 89 mins.

It’s so important to choose the right materials for the task at hand, and when it comes to animating a pig nervously giving a back massage to a fat man in the bath, only Plasticine will do. Watch Early Man, the new film from Aardman Animations, and you’ll understand. Mere words can’t do the sequence justice, even ones like "wibble" and "moob". It’s the kind of comic set-piece you find yourself laughing about days later in bed, as you fall asleep, just at the thought of how it looked.

But ever since the Creature Comforts days, that’s always been the Aardman way. Their characters’ comedic power seems to bulge and ripple from within, squeezed into the clay with every animator’s pinch and tweak. Perhaps Early Man feels so infused with bygone craftsmanship because it is the first Aardman film in ten years to have been directed by Nick Park, the creator of Wallace and Gromit and devisor of the Bristol-based studio’s pop-eyed and orthodontically challenged house style. Or it might just feel old-fashioned because it’s set in caveman times.