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Nick Park, the guest on this episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, is a legendary animator and filmmaker who has, for the last 40 years, been the star employee of Aardman Animations, a company based in Bristol, England, that specializes in stop-motion and clay animation. Both Park and Aardman are best known for two plasticine characters that Park created even before he began working at Aardman, and has put at the center of four shorts and two features: Wallace and Gromit.
Park personally has been nominated for six Oscars and won four — three for best animated short and one for best animated feature. He has also won a Peabody Award; six BAFTA awards; and three Annie awards, plus the Winsor McCay Annie Award for career achievement. And he was made a Commander of the British Empire in the Queen’s Honors in 1997. He has been described by the New York Times as “brilliant,” by the Wall Street Journal as “a phenomenal filmmaker,” by the Washington Post as “the undisputed, undefeated king of animation” and by the Los Angeles Times as “among the best clay animators of his generation” and “Britain’s foremost animator.”
As for Wallace, a scatterbrained, cheese-loving bachelor in the north of England who enjoys inventing Rube Goldberg-like contraptions, and Gromit, his faithful dog, who is actually quite a bit sharper than he is, and tends to get him out of the messes that he creates? Britain’s Financial Times has called them “national treasures,” while the Liverpool Echo has described them as “loved by the nation” and “household names.”
Over the course of a conversation at the Hollywood offices of Netflix, Park, who is 65, reflected on his path to animation, generally, and to stop-motion and clay animation, specifically; what inspired the names, looks and personality traits of Wallace and Gromit; and how he, and Wallace and Gromit, wound up at Aardman. He also discussed what led him to revisit the characters in his new film, Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl — only the second feature-length Wallace and Gromit film, and the first since 2005 — which he co-directed with Merlin Crossingham, and which will drop on Netflix on Jan. 3, 2025.