Nick Park is the stop-motion animator who has won four Oscars for films featuring absent-minded inventor Wallace and his vigilant dog, Gromit. Park was a student at the National Film and Television School when he met Peter Lord and David Sproxton of Aardman Animations. He joined their studio in 1985 and worked on TV commercials while polishing A Grand Day Out, his first short film with Wallace and Gromit. Shown in 1990 on BBC, the film became an international hit and was nominated for an Oscar the next year. It lost to another short film by Park, Creature Comforts (1989), but since then Park has picked up Oscars for the Wallace & Gromit short films The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995), and for the feature Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005). Aardman Animations, with Lord and Park at the helm, also made the animated feature Chicken Run, a box office smash that had the voice talents of Mel Gibson and Imelda Staunton. Park's other work includes a 2003 series that extended the idea behind Creature Comforts (man-on-the-street interviews synched with stop-motion animation), and Shaun the Sheep, a BBC series that started in 2007.
Wallace is voiced by actor Peter Sallis; Gromit is mute... Park's writing partner for The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit was veteran TV scripter Bob Baker.
Career Highlights: A Close Shave, Chicken Run, Creature Comforts
First Major Screen Credit: The Amazing Adventures of Morph (1980)
Biography
A man whose creative brilliance is superceded only by the eccentricities on display in his work, writer/director/producer/animator Nick Park has been revolutionizing the art of claymation since 1989, when he made the Oscar-winning short Creature Comforts. Working in concert with Aardman Animations, Park has created a bizarre, inextricably British universe where mute dogs solve riddles that elude their dim owners, penguins plot dastardly deeds, chickens act out their own version of The Great Escape, and cheese is granted a standing of disquieting importance.
Born in Preston, Lancashire, on December 6, 1958, Park was exposed to both chickens and animation at an early age. He made his first animated film at the age of 13 and made his professional debut four years later, on BBC television, with the animated short Archie's Concrete Nightmare (1975). After attending the Sheffield Art School, where he studied communication arts, Park went on to earn a degree in animation from the National Film and Television School, where he began working on A Grand Day Out. The stop-motion clay animation feature, which starred the signature characters of Wallace, a dim inventor, and Gromit, his brilliant but put-upon dog, would take years to finish; in the interim, Park joined Aardman Animations in 1986, where he first worked on the Peter Gabriel music video "Sledgehammer."
Collaborating with Aardman co-founder Peter Lord and the Brothers Quay, Park spent the next few years contributing to Aardman's Lip Synch, a series of short films for Channel Four television, and wrote, animated, and directed Creature Comforts (1990), a five-minute short about unhappy zoo animals complaining about their living conditions. The short proved to be a critical and popular success, leading to both a celebrated advertising campaign for electricity on British TV and Park's first Oscar nomination. Park's nomination was accompanied that same year by a second, in the same category of Best Animated Short, for the now-complete A Grand Day Out. The former film ended up winning the award, while the latter launched a craze for Wallace & Gromit. In Great Britain the Wallace & Gromit characters became a fairly substantial industry, with the beady-eyed, toothy likenesses of the inventor and his dog gracing products ranging from coffee mugs to pens.
Another Wallace & Gromit outing, The Wrong Trousers, followed in 1993. Like its predecessor, the animated film combined a clever plot with lovably eccentric heroes and a breathtaking manipulation of clay, and its creator was rewarded for his efforts with a second Oscar. The film's success added to the Wallace & Gromit cult, as did the third installment, 1995's A Close Shave. The winner of another Best Animated Short Oscar for Park, the film led many fans to anticipate a feature-length outing; instead, Park and fellow director Peter Lord decided to focus their creative attention on making, in their words, "The Great Escape with chickens."
Undoubtedly their most ambitious project to date, the film, Chicken Run, took over five years to complete, and combined CGI effects with thousands of hours of painstaking manual animation. The result, which incorporated the vocal talents of such noted actors as Julia Swahala, Mel Gibson, Jane Horrocks, and Miranda Richardson, more than vindicated the hard work of its creators. Equal parts adventure, love story, comedy, and sly commentary on labor politics, Chicken Run was a huge commercial and critical triumph on both sides of the Atlantic, delighting both die-hard Park fans and inspiring thousands of enthusiastic new converts.
In 2003 he revisited an idea that had garnered him attention 13 years before, with a half-hour long Creature Comforts TV series. Based on the same premise of claymation animals in various settings matter-of-factly discussing their lives as if being interviewed for a documentary, the series was a hit. It wouldn't be the last time Park elaborated on an older idea to make something new: in 2005 he directed a full-length feature film about the beloved inventor and his dog with Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of The Were-Rabbit. He found mainstream success with the effort, even picking up an Oscar for Best Animated Feature Film. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, All Movie Guide
Nicholas Wulstan "Nick" Park, CBE (born 6 December 1958) is a four-time Academy Award-winning Englishfilmmaker of stop motionanimation best known as the creator of Wallace and Gromit. He has been nominated for an Oscar five times and won four times (the fifth nomination was against another of his own films).
Nick Park was born Preston in Lancashire, England, and attended Cuthbert Mayne High School (now Our Lady's Catholic High School). He grew up with a keen interest in drawing cartoons, and as a 13-year old made films with the help of his mother – who was a dressmaker – and her home movie camera and cotton bobbins. He also took after his father, an amateur inventor, and would send items – such as a bottle that squeezed out different coloured wools – to Blue Peter.[1] He studied Communication Arts at Sheffield Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University) and then went to the National Film and Television School, where he started making the first Wallace and Gromit film, A Grand Day Out.
Career
In 1985, he joined the staff of Aardman Animations in Bristol, where he worked as an animator on commercial products (including the video for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer", where he worked on the famous dance scene involving oven-ready chickens). He had also had a part in animating Pee-wee's Playhouse. Along with all this, he had finally completed A Grand Day Out, and with that in post-production, he made Creature Comforts as his contribution to a series of shorts called "Lip Synch". Creature Comforts matched animated zoo animals with a soundtrack of people talking about their homes. The two films were nominated for a host of awards; A Grand Day Out beat Creature Comforts for the BAFTA award, but it was Creature Comforts that won Park his first Oscar.
Two more Wallace and Gromit shorts, The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995), followed, both winning Oscars. He then made his first feature-length film, Chicken Run (2000), co-directed with Aardman founder Peter Lord. He also supervised a new series of "Creature Comforts" films for British television in 2003.
His second theatrical feature-length film and first Wallace and Gromit feature, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, was released on 5 October 2005, to much critical acclaim. The film was rewarded with the Best Animated Feature Oscar at the 78th Annual Awards, 6 March 2006.
On 10 October 2005, a fire gutted Aardman Animations' archive warehouse.[2] The fire resulted in the loss of most of Park's creations, including the models and sets used in the movie Chicken Run. However, some of the original Wallace & Gromit models and sets, as well as the master prints of the finished films, were elsewhere and survived.
Park's most recent work includes a U.S. version of Creature Comforts, a weekly television series that was on CBS every Monday evening at 8 p.m. ET. In the series, Americans were interviewed about a range of subjects. The interviews were lip synced to Aardman animal characters.
In September 2007, it was announced that Nick Park has been commissioned to design a bronze statue of Wallace and Gromit, which will be placed in his home town of Preston.[3] In October 2007 it was announced that the BBC has commissioned another Wallace & Gromit short film to be entitled Trouble at Mill[4] (retitled later to A Matter of Loaf and Death).
Nick Park has a part of Preston College named after him. The Park Campus which is situated on Moor Park, was named after him due to the media and animation inside the building. He is the recipient of a gold Blue Peter badge.[1]
Personal life
The Daily Telegraph remarked Park has taken on some attributes of Wallace, just "as dog-owners come to look like their pets", overexpressing himself, likely as a result of having to show animators how he wants his characters to behave.[1]
He is a fan of The Beano comic, and guest-edited the 70th anniversary issue dated 2 August 2008. He also contributed to Classics from the Comics at the same time, picking his favourite classic stories for the comic reprint magazine's new Classic Choice feature.
