Nick Park joined Aardman in 1986 to work at the studio with Peter Lord and David Sproxton and at the same time to complete A Grand Day Out, a film he had started while a student at the National Film and Television School.
Nominated for an Academy Award, A Grand Day Out (1989) introduced the world to Wallace, the eccentric, cheese-loving inventor and his faithful dog, Gromit.
The story was pure comic-book adventure - building a space rocket and blasting-off to the moon in search of cheese. The characters, however, were strongly delineated; the naive, somewhat inept Wallace (voiced by Peter Sallis) and the real brains behind the partnership, Gromit, whose facial expressions - wide, slightly mournful eyes - quickly register his despair, frustration or total incredulity.
The success of A Grand Day Out demanded a sequel, and in 1993 Wallace and Gromit returned in The Wrong Trousers, followed two years later by A Close Shave, all three films having been commissioned by Colin Rose of the BBC. The later films, both of which won Oscars(R), have tightly constructed plots involving a villainous penguin disguised as a chicken and a psychopathic mechanical dog. They are packed with visual jokes (Gromit reading a paper carrying the headline 'Dog Reads Paper') and verbal puns (Gromit's collection of records by Bach), and there is a proliferation of wacky gadgets, ranging from the ex-NASA Techno Trousers to Wallace's Knit-O-Matic machine via a porridge gun and a device that catapults dollops of jam onto a piece of toast as it springs out of a pop-up toaster.
Park's films work on many levels. Children respond to the broad character comedy, adults to the more sophisticated elements including the affectionate spoofing of movie genres such as horror films, thrillers, heist pictures, action movies and the deep shadows and crazy camera angles of film noir. This richness of character and relentlessly paced animation (the model train chase in The Wrong Trousers and the motorbike pursuit in A Close Shave) have carried clay animation to unprecedented heights.
Extract from the book 'Cracking Animation' by Brian Sibley
