Nicholas Wulstan "Nick" Park, CBE is an English director, writer, and animator
best known as the creator of Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep. Park has
been nominated for an Academy Award a total of six times, and won four with
Creature Comforts, The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave, and Wallace & Gromit: The
Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Early life
Park was born in Brookfield Park in Preston in Lancashire, England and grew
up on Greenlands Estate, Preston and later moved to Walmer Bridge, where his
mother still resides. He is the middle child, of five siblings. He was born to
Mary Cecilia Ashton, a seamstress, and Roger Wulstan Park, an architectural
photographer. His sister Janet lives in Longton. He attended Cuthbert Mayne 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.
He studied Communication Arts at Sheffield City Polytechnic 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.
He also had a part in animating the Pee-wee's Playhouse which featured Paul
Reubens. 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.
In 1990 Park worked alongside advertising agency GGK to develop a
series of highly acclaimed television advertisements for the "Heat Electric"
campaign. The Creature Comforts advertisements are now regarded as among
the best advertisements ever shown on British television, as voted by viewers
of the UK's main commercial channels ITV and Channel 4.
Two more Wallace and Gromit shorts, The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave,
followed, both winning Oscars. He then made his first feature-length film,
Chicken Run, 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, and won Best Animated Feature Oscar at the 78th Academy
Awards, 6 March 2006. On 10 October 2005, a fire gutted
Aardman Animations' archive warehouse. The fire resulted in the loss of most of
Park's creations, including the models and sets used in the movie Chicken Run.
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 pm 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 had 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 had commissioned another Wallace & Gromit short film to
be entitled Trouble at Mill. Nick Park studied at Preston College,
which has since named its library for the art and design department after him:
the Nick Park Library Learning Centre. He is the recipient of a gold Blue Peter
badge. By the beginning of 2010, Park had won 4
Academy Awards and had the distinction of having won an Oscar every time he had
been nominated. This streak ended in the 2010 Oscars when Wallace & Gromit: A
Matter of Loaf and Death failed to win the best animated short Oscar.
In February 2011, Park made his first ever appearance, himself as an animated
character in The Simpsons episode, "Angry Dad: The Movie". His new Willis
and Crumble short, Better Gnomes and Gardens borrows elements and themes from
Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Lisa Simpson asks Park, in
case he does not receive the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film:
Lisa: Good luck, Mr. Park. There'd be no shame in losing to you.
Park: Oh, that's very sweet of you. Thank you for saying so. [after shaking
hands, Park's fingers come off] Lisa: Agh!
Park: No worries. I'll just stick 'em back on. I'm more clay than man now.
(Note: Willis and Crumble are a parody of Park's characters Wallace and Gromit.
Also, stop-motion animation is produced by Chiodo Bros. Productions, Inc., not
Aardman.) In late 2011, Park directed a music
video for 'Plain Song'- a song by Native and the Name, a Sheffield band led by
Joe Rose, the son of an old university friend. The video was filmed at Birkdale
School, Sheffield, and Park also selected the track as one of his Desert
Island Discs when he went on the show in 2011, which led to suggestions that Park
was using his fame to give a friend a leg-up in his career. Park denied these
claims insisting it had become one of his favourite songs. The song and video
can be found on YouTube. In 2013, Park was involved in the
British stage adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki's animated film, Princess
Mononoke. He was the executive producer of Shaun
the Sheep Movie and he also voiced himself in a cameo.
For 2018, he is directing another Aardman Animation's stop-motion film,
titled Early Man. Set in the time of dinosaurs and mammoths, it will tell a
story of a caveman who unites his tribesmen against a mighty enemy, while
unintentionally inventing football. 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,
possibly as a result of having to show animators how he wants his characters to
behave. 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.
His film-making ideas were encouraged by his old English teacher; however Park
has denied that the character of Wallace was based on him.
Filmography = Film=
= Television= Awards and nominations
References External links
U.S. News & World Report interview Making His Mark in Clay: An Interview
with Nick Park Nick Park speaks about his influences, on how he uses drawing
to tell a story and tells us what it was like to bring Wallace and Gromit to the
big screen.