When stop-motion legend Nick Park enrolled at the National Film and Television School in the early ’80s, very few were animating with clay. It was a slow and incredibly labor-intensive format, with relatively crude results. (Gumby, anybody?)
Four decades later, thanks in large part to Park’s Academy Award-winning success at Aardman Animation — and a beloved duo named Wallace and Gromit — stop-motion is a format thriving on multiple continents, with enough specialists to support several productions at a time. The recipient of Variety’s Creative Impact in Animation Award, Park not only put Aardman on the map, but made the cumbersome medium one where filmmakers such as Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro and Wes Anderson were inspired to explore.
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“My ambition was to be a cartoonist and to create my own characters,” Park remembers over tea at the 2024 Annecy Animation Festival, where he unveiled footage from his forthcoming stop-motion feature, “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.” As Park recalls, around the age of 13, “I saw a documentary about Disney, and I remember seeing how it all started with this mouse.”
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Inspired by Walt Disney’s path, he started drawing characters, including Walter the Rat, whom Park taught himself to animate using the Bell & Howell Super 8 camera his dad had given his mom as a present. Nick was one of five kids, all of whom were creative, but the only one to take an interest in filmmaking. His father, a professional photographer, taught him the basics and encouraged him to experiment with the camera, which featured a stop-frame button ideal for animation.
“I think I was more wanting to do puppets than clay to begin with,” says Park, whose mom was a tailor. “She had a whole box of sewing bits and pieces, which I used to make my own puppets out of pipe cleaners and scraps of fabric.” He drew inspiration from Ray Harryhausen’s work on “One Million Years B.C.,” as well as Terry Gilliam’s kooky cut-outs for Monty Python.
Park just needed to find his Mickey Mouse. In addition to Walter, he came up with Benny the Beaver (“that didn’t go very far,” he admits) and a Neanderthal named Murphy (“a very early version of ‘Early Man’”), who had a pet dinosaur named Bongo. Around that time, he started to work with Plasticine, an oil-based modeling clay ideal for sculpting human characters.
“I used to dream that one day they might be known,” Park says, sounding almost mystified by his good fortune. After all, few animators — not even Disney himself — can say that a character they created in school would go on to have as successful a run as Wallace and Gromit. Films starring the pair have been nominated for five Oscars, winning two for shorts and one for animated feature.
Park hatched the idea for his first Wallace and Gromit short, “A Grand Day Out,” while a student at the National Film and Television School. “The whole joke was about this mild-mannered inventor in the north of England, who decides to build a rocket in the basement of his house,” Park says.
His long-suffering canine companion, Gromit, was originally conceived as a cat, but Park found a dog far easier to craft. “I’ve never really known much about pets,” confesses the director, whose limitations in that department — designing a penguin that can pass for a chicken, for example — are an endearing part of his style.
Originally, Park planned for Gromit to speak, even going so far as to record a demo track for “A Grand Day Out.” He asked the late Peter Sallis to play Wallace, and wanted Peter Hawkins (who’d voiced the Daleks in “Doctor Who”) to provide a cartoonish, Scooby-Doo-style voice for Gromit. But Park scrapped that idea almost immediately.
“In the first shot at film school, Gromit was looking really hacked off because Wallace was using him as a trestle [or saw horse],” says Park, who intended for Gromit to growl back at his master. “I just couldn’t get in there to reach his mouth, so I started to animate his brow instead. When people saw the rushes, everyone was like, ‘Whoa, that has a lot of personality. You know what he’s feeling.’ It was a happy accident, but suddenly I had a dynamic between the two of them.”
Meanwhile, Sallis’ voice shaped Wallace’s personality. “I was trying to make a mark, different to everything I saw,” Park says. “The way he said ‘cheese’ and ‘allotment doors’ [lent itself to] these very basic, Bob Godfrey-style extreme mouths,” like he had seen in the “Charley Says” public service shorts playing on British TV, which he combined with amusingly proportioned characters, à la Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” cartoons.
While in school at NFTS, Park invited Aardman co-founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton to visit. The pair accepted, screening their own work before taking a look at Park’s slow-moving thesis project. “About a month later, I got a phone call saying, ‘Why don’t you come and work for us in the summer?’” Park recalls. “I think it was because there were no other clay animators around.”
Park arranged a deal with the Bristol-based studio where he would work on various projects for Aardman by day — from animating kids TV character Morph to collaborating with the Brothers Quay on the music video for Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” — while finishing up “A Grand Day Out” in his free time. It took Park nearly seven years to complete the short, which earned him an Oscar nomination, though he lost — to himself: his now-classic Aardman commission “Creature Comforts” from the same year won instead.
Every subsequent Wallace and Gromit outing has been made in-house at Aardman, along with “A Close Shave” spinoff “Shaun the Sheep.” When it came time to pitch a feature to Hollywood, “We didn’t want to spoil Wallace and Gromit,” Park says. “But it was such a massive undertaking, me and Pete [Lord] would need to direct it together, so we wanted the project that we could both start fresh on.” And thus “Chicken Run” was hatched.
“[The film] just started as a doodle in my sketchbook of a chicken digging its way out of a chicken coop,” Park says. “We were at the Sundance Festival, and DreamWorks organized a private jet to fly over to L.A., where we met that night in a well-known chicken restaurant.”
Jeffrey Katzengberg and Steven Spielberg loved the pitch. “I’ve got 300 chickens on my ranch, and ‘The Great Escape’ is one of my favorite movies ever,” Park remembers Spielberg saying.
“We were not confident about stop-motion on the big screen back then,” Park remembers. Released a few years earlier, Henry Selick’s “A Nightmare Before Christmas” featured a relatively elaborate style, shot on “singles” (the models are photographed 24 times a second, whereas Aardman worked on “doubles,” exposing two frames per pose, resulting in a slightly jerkier look).
Still, the director’s experience on “Chicken Run” became a training ground to make “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” “The main challenge is how to tell a story at 70 to 80 minutes,” he says. “It’s such a different ballgame than making a 30-minute film. You have to keep it constantly moving and get the escalation right, so there are no saggy bits.”
Park co-directed “Were-Rabbit” with Steve Box, who’d been his right-hand man on “The Wrong Trousers.” (Box animated diamond-pinching penguin Feathers McGraw in the Oscar-winning 1993 short.) “We used to say, ‘It’s thumby and funny.’ We didn’t want to apologize for the fingerprints,” Park says.
While Aardman remained committed to its hands-on stop-motion technique, a CG revolution was fueling a resurgence in feature-length animation worldwide, from “Toy Story” to “Shrek.” Still, it’s widely believed that “Chicken Run” was the film that inspired the Academy to create an animated feature category, and right around the time that “Were-Rabbit” won, the stop-motion films “Coraline” and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” went into production at other studios.
The technology has changed over the span of Park’s career. Digital cameras make it possible for Aardman’s animators to check and adjust their work, while visual effects assist with water, fog and other details. “All the puppets and most of the sets are for real. But sometimes, the digital guys can come in and create more space behind, or a sky that seems much further away and things like that,” Park explains.
As much as the medium may evolve, Park likes to keep things … primitive. In 2016, he went into production on “Early Man.” And now, Park is returning to his roots “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl,” which he is co-directing with Merlin Crossingham, and features the return of Feather, the duo’s greatest adversary.
“I had this idea knocking around since ‘Curse of the Were-Rabbit,’ because gnomes have always been a part of Wallace and Gromit world,” explains Park, acknowledging that Wallace will be voiced by Ben Whitehead (since Sallis died in 2017). “I was planning a short film, maybe a Christmas BBC half-hour or something. But I had struggles with what would motivate the gnomes. For years, people had asked, ‘Would you ever bring Feathers back?’ but I couldn’t think of a context for it. Suddenly, it seemed that would be the perfect story solution.”
Feathers previously inspired one of the single greatest sequences in stop-motion history: the toy train chase in 1993’s Oscar-winning “The Wrong Trousers.” It and many others have exerted an incalculable impact on animation that doesn’t stop with Aardman. Viewers can identify his sensibility in the googly eyes and toothy grins of the characters in Pixar’s “Turning Red” and “Luca,” the wacky inventions of “Despicable Me,” and even the charmingly English awkwardness of the live-action “Paddington” films. After almost 40 years in animation, and with great work still coming — not just from him but also his many disciples — it’s clear Park didn’t merely lay down his own track, but invited others, and an entire
industry followed.