Creature Comforts

In 1991, Nick Park's CREATURE COMFORTS won an Academy Award for Best Short Film (Animated), beating out another one of his films, A GRAND DAY OUT, starring Wallace and Gromit. CREATURE COMFORTS was the fifth film in a British TV series called LIP SYNCH. Park's short inspired a set of commercials in which claymation animals acted as spokepersons for the British Electric Board. The income from the commercials helped keep Aardman Animations financially afloat. Park recorded about half the interviews for his short. "I tried to to ask questions that would produce the kind of answers that animals might make," he remarked for the book CREATING 3-D ANIMATION: THE AARDMAN BOOK OF FILMMAKING. After the interviewers were over, Park later decided which animal would fit each voice. For instance, he considered making the voice of the Brazilian student into a penguin; Park later decided to use the voice for the jaguar. "Do you like steaks and chips with lions with it?"--Polar bear to another polar bear "Here you have everything sorted out--double glazing, your heating and everything, but you don't have space!"--Jaguar to interviewer "Animals in the circus have to sit on boxes and balls, but animals in the zoo, they don't have to do anything. They can do their own thing, like drinking and eating."--Bird to interviewer "The idea for WAT'S PIG came during a holiday in France. I was in the Dordogne, where you can see these huge medieval castles standing in full view of one another. I thought, how difficult to have been a peasant in the middle of this lot, caught up in the intrigues of warring barons who held the key to everything you did in life," Peter Lord commented in CREATING 3-D ANIMATION: THE AARDMAN BOOK OF FILMMAKING. "For nonpayment of installments, the contractee shall go to hell, without further notice."--Auntie, reading the fine print in her contract For the scene in ADAM where Adam runs around the globe seemingly in defiance of gravity, the camera was placed on the ceiling, looking downwards; a glass was placed around the circumference of the globe, so that the clay figure is actually supported at all times.

Aardman Animations, the creators of "Wallace and Gromit," present this collection of clay animation shorts: "Creature Comforts" (1989), "Wat's Pig" (1996), "Not Without My Handbag" (1993) and "Adam" (1991).

An animation festival wrapped into one convenient video package, this collection consists of four short films that highlight the diversity and highly unique visions of contemporary British practioners of the art of claymation. Nick Park's contribution, the hilarious CREATURE COMFORTS, takes actual dialogue recorded by Park and an assistant and animates the interviews as if they were the thoughts of various zoo animals. WAT'S PIG, directed by Peter Lord, uses a split screen to illustrate the contrasting lives of a king and a pig-keeper, who are actually twins separated at birth. Boris Kessmehl's NOT WITHOUT MY HANDBAG takes place in a world where failure to make installment payments on a washing machine can lead to the loss of one's soul. In the final film, ADAM, Lord imagines the stop-motion animator as god and his clay creation as his put-upon, often unruly subject.