The name of Nick Park is synonymous with that of Aardman Animations, the Bristol-based company founded in the early 1970s by Peter Lord and David Sproxton that has been responsible for a highly successful series of 3-D stop-frame animation shorts made for British television. The most celebrated of these shorts have been the three films featuring the adventures of Wallace, a nondescript northerner with a flair for ramshackle invention, and his perspicacious but put-upon dog, Gromit. The first, A Grand Day Out, started out as Park’s graduation project at the National Film and Television School (NFTS), where he studied animation from 1980 to 1983, and was finally completed in 1989. The Wrong Trousers was screened on BBC 2 at Christmas 1993: the highest-rated program over the two-day holiday period, it went on to become one of BBC Worldwide’s most valuable properties both for video sales and merchandising. It also brought Park his second Academy Award for Best Animated Short, the first having been picked up for another Aardman film, Creature Comforts, in 1991. The third in the Wallace and Gromit trilogy, A Close Shave, also won an Oscar in 1996.

Park’s work with Aardman Animations is a popular manifestation of the wider, if less frequently reported, success enjoyed by British animation since the 1980s, much of which has been nurtured by Channel 4 and its commissioning editor for animation. Aardman’s highly successful work on commercials—particularly the captivating “Heat Electric” campaign, a stylistic and thematic development of Creature Comforts—has also allowed the company to spread its wings, a reminder of the importance of this area of television production as a source of funding and creative experiment in a country bereft of a subsidized film industry.

Park began making puppet animations in his parents’ attic at the age of 13, using the family’s Bell and Howell 8 mm camera. He was persuaded to show his work at school, and in 1975 his entry in the European Young Filmmaker of the Year Competition, Archie’s Concrete Nightmare, was shown on BBC Television. He completed a B.A. in Communication Arts at the Sheffield Arts School before going on to study animation at the NFTS. His work shows the signs of his early fascination with science fiction and monster films and the special effects of Ray Harryhausen, as well as his later admiration for the imaginative animated puppetry of Ladislaw Starewicz, Jiri Trnka, and Jan Svankmajer. However, it is the influence of a childhood filled with Heath Robinson inventions (his parents once fashioned a caravan from a box and set of wheels, fitting it out with makeshift furniture and decoration) that seems to permeate the world of Wallace and Gromit, a world of handmade objects, idiosyncratic domestic details, and, above all, enterprising mechanical contraptions.

Park’s stop-frame animation of plasticine models has developed into a distinctive and highly sophisticated technique and is often perceived as the Aardman house style, although the company has used a number of other processes—in the Peter Gabriel “Sledgehammer” pop promo, for example, on which Park collaborated with several independent animators, including the Brothers Quay. The method grew out of Aardman’s work in the 1970s on sequences for BBC Children’s Television featuring Morph, a plasticine character capable of metamorphosing into a multitude of shapes. Park’s first job with the company was on the Morph production line. By this time, Aardman had also made two series, Animated Conversations for the BBC and Lip Synch for Channel 4, in which plasticine characters were animated to a sound track built from “fly-on-the-wall” recordings of real conversations and interviews. This became the basis of Park’s award-winning Creature Comforts, in which a range of vox-pop interviews about people’s living conditions provide the speech for animals commenting on their life behind bars in a zoo. It was here that the subtle psychological and sociological characterization and carefully observed facial and gestural expressiveness that are the features of Wallace and Gromit were developed. For all their farcical playfulness, these narratives are shot through with stinging moments of poignancy, as the animated figures momentarily betray the pain, longing, and regret behind a life of repressed British ordinariness.

Although particularly televisual in its domestic intimacy and attention to psychological detail, Park’s work has also brought a sophisticated level of film literacy into the process of animation. With their larger budgets, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave are not only technically more accomplished than A Grand Day Out but also are more cinematic in their use of lighting, framing, and camera movement. Both later pieces are also full of film allusion and pastiche, with references to a number of popular genres and stock sequences, as well as specific British and American movies. It was no surprise, therefore, when Park and his collaborators were offered the opportunity to try their hand at feature filmmaking. The result was the farmyard comedy Chicken Run, released in 2000 and based on a long-held idea of Park’s himself: The Great Escape, enacted with chickens.