Nick Park, CBE, RDI

Nicholas Wulstan Park, CBE, RDI, is an animator, director and writer, best known as the creator of Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts and Shaun the Sheep. He has been nominated for an Academy Award a total of six times, and won four. He has also received five BAFTA Awards.

Get out and make films. There are so many cameras now to suit any budget, so there are no excuses.

He was born in Brookfield Park in Preston, Lancashire, the middle child of five siblings.

He grew up with a keen interest in drawing cartoons, and as a 13-year-old made films with the help of his mother and her home movie camera and cotton bobbins.

He also took after his father, an amateur inventor, and would send homemade items like a bottle that squeezed out different coloured wools in to Blue Peter - He is now the recipient of the highly prized gold Blue Peter badge.

Like my father, I would never as a child throw anything away, keeping old toys, electric motors and bits of broken machines under my bed in what I called my Box of Useful Things.

When I was a teenager, my dad watched my films and told me I could go to art college and study animation. He made me see that I could do this for a living.

Plasticine was available when I was a teenager and started doing animation. I wanted to be like Disney, trying to film with plastic cels, but it was all too expensive. I didn't have enough money to buy cels, at least not enough to make more than four-and-half seconds of animation. But Plasticine was around, user-friendly and available to the masses. It was great because all you needed was camera, an Anglepoise lamp and a table. And you would make whatever you like come out of a blob of Plasticine.

He studied Communication Arts at Sheffield City 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.

Gromit was the name of a cat. When I started modelling the cat I just didn't feel it was quite right, so I made it into a dog because he could have a bigger nose and bigger, longer legs.

In 1985, he joined the staff of Aardman Animations in Bristol, where he worked as an animator on commercial projects (including the music video for Peter Gabriel's Sledgehammer, where he worked on the dance scene involving oven-ready chickens). 

Part of the brief in a way was to look like a fourteen-year-old kid had made it in their attic and in a way that was the way it ended up because of the speed that we did it at. It bridged the gap between pop and fine art and it changed the face of pop videos that, I think. I don't think that's overstating it, I think it did.

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.

He made two further Wallace and Gromit shorts, The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995), both winning Oscars.

It's quite a challenge when most animated movies have fast-paced, wall-to-wall dialog and ours features a silent, plasticine dog. But I think people see Wallace and Gromit as something akin to an elderly couple. These two know each other so well. Nothing can split them apart.

I think we all have a Wallace and Gromit inside us. Wallace is the part that has wild plans. Gromit is the sensible side, reining you in.

On the 25th November 1997, he was awarded a CBE by the Queen.

His first feature-length film, Chicken Run (2000), co-directed with Aardman founder Peter Lord is the highest-grossing stop motion animated film. Interestingly, two of the characters, Ginger and Rocky, were the names of pet chickens he had as a boy.

I always considered Ray Harryhausen's work so fine that it was way out of my league: in terms of realism and naturalism, in terms of animal movement.

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.

We can do things that we never could before. Stop-motion lets you build tiny little worlds, and computers make that world even more believable.

During 2007 and 2008 Park's work included a United States version of Creature Comforts, a weekly television series that was on CBS every Monday evening at 8 pm ET.

In October 2007, it was announced that the BBC had commissioned another Wallace & Gromit short film to be entitled Trouble at Mill... later retitled as A Matter of Loaf and Death. It was also the most watched television programme in the UK in 2008.

A huge fan of the Ealing comedies and Beano comic; Parks guest edited the 70th anniversary issue dated the 2nd August 2008. 

In February 2011, he made his first acting role, voicing himself in a cameo on the Simpsons episode Angry Dad: The Movie.

In 2015, he was executive producer of Shaun the Sheep and made another cameo appearance.

In 2018, he directed Early Man, another Aardman animation feature, which tells the story of a caveman who unites his tribe against the Bronze Age whilst unintentionally inventing football.

On 21 May 2019, Park announced that a new Wallace and Gromit project is currently in the works, with an unknown release date.

Maybe I love Gromit because he's the dog I've never had. What dog could match him? He's the ideal. He doesn't bark, and he has your tea and dinner ready for you when you arrive home.

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