Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park has told RTÉ Entertainment that his new animated comedy Early Man is not a Brexit allegory as some have suggested.
The film, which has just opened in Irish cinemas, sees Stone Age teenager Dug (voiced by Eddie Redmayne) challenge the wealth-obsessed Lord Nooth (voiced by Tom Hiddleston) to a football match in a bid to keep Dug's valley home safe from Nooth's Bronze Age city.
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In its review, The Guardian said the "claymation comedy brings Brexit to the Bronze Age", and is "a timely story about a Stone Age English tribe playing footie against sophisticated continentals".
"That could be an overzealous interpretation, admittedly, in a climate in which everything seems to be about Brexit," wrote reviewer Steve Rose, "but the evidence is difficult to ignore.
"Early Man focuses on an insular, small-minded tribe who live in a giant crater, cut off from the outside world (the prologue identifies their location as 'near Manchester')."
However, when RTÉ Entertainment met Early Man director Park in Dublin this week, he laughed off any suggestion that his film is about Britain's decision to leave the EU.
"Well, we started filming before Brexit," he explained. "We had these guys with their valley - they want their valley back from this superior, European Bronze Age force.
"And it was 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 or being anti-European in any way. So we sort of made some adjustments, while keeping the story together.
"So that really, by the end, it's inclusive, and football brings about peace. And our guys, they may have their valley back, but they've got to move on as well - they've got to adapt [to] Bronze Age ways.
"It's not about Brexit!"
