Everything about Nick Park totally explained
Nicholas Wulstan Park, CBE (b.
December 6,
1958) is a four-time
Academy Award-winning
English filmmaker of
stop motion animation 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 in
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. 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.
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"). He had also had a part in animating
Pee-wee's Playhouse. Along with all this, he'd 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,, was released on
October 5,
2005, to much critical acclaim. The film was rewarded with the Best Animated Feature Oscar at the 78th Annual Awards,
March 6,
2006.
On
October 10,
2005, fire gutted out
Aardman Animations' archive warehouse. The fire resulted in the loss of most of Park's creations, including the models and sets used in the hit 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. In October 2007 it was announced that the
BBC has commissioned another Wallace & Gromit short film to be entitled
Trouble at Mill. (retitled later to
A Matter of Loaf and Death)
Further Information
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