Nick Park, born 1958, is 55 today. An English animator who works primarily in stop-motion and with clay/Plasticene, he is best known for not only putting Aardman Animation on the map and continuing to use stop motion well into the computer animated era, but he also contributed two of the greatest animated characters to the canon: Wallace and Gromit.
Park started work on the first Wallace and Gromit short, A Grand Day Out, while in college, before joining Aardman in 1985. He animated several music videos and commercials, most notable the video for Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. A Grand Day Out was completed in 1989, and released the same year as Creature Comforts, another Aardman project in which zoo animals were animated saying dialogue recorded by British citizens talking about their homes. The latter film won Park his first Oscar, and he was commissioned by an agency to further the concept in a series of commercials for electric heating that were widely praised on British television.
In the 90’s, Park made two more Wallace and Gromit stories: The Wrong Trousers, about a pair of robotic pants that are stolen by a penguin jewel thief, and A Close Shave, about Shaun the sheep and his run-ins with the pair. Shaun was later the star of his own series from 2007-2010. Park moved into feature films in the 2000’s, with Chicken Run, a film about chickens who escape from the farmers who wish to turn them into pies, and Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a feature-length Wallace and Gromit adventure that won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Park has four total Oscars, three from Wallace and Gromit alone. Park’s recent work included another Wallace and Gromit short, A Matter of Loaf and Death, in 2008, the aforementioned Shaun series, an America run of Creature Comforts shorts, and a stage production of Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke.
Also born today:
Craig Brewer (42)
Judd Apatow (46)
Steven Wright (58)
Tom Hulce (60)
JoBeth Williams (65)
