It's taken Nick Park and his team at Aardman Animation five years. Now The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is ready to go global. He tells Donald Clarke about his inspiration for those unlikely heroes, Wallace and Gromit, his relationship with Hollywood monolith Dreamworks, and how he thinks it's time for American culture to learn to cope with a few British idiosyncrasies.
Nick Park potters about his luxury hotel room, dunking a tea bag. "Are there any biscuits?" he asks the publicist. "There were some earlier. Maybe we could get some more." The creator of Wallace and Gromit is not wearing a tank-top and he doesn't order any cheese, but it's hard to think of a director whose demeanour more effectively summons up the world of his pictures. John Ford barked orders like a cavalry general. Jean-Luc Godard communicates in the same elliptical riddles as his characters. Fellini was, well, Felliniesque. All these film-makers are or were, however, involved in some sort of performance. Nobody would suggest that Nick's shuffling introversion is an act. He couldn't be more Parkian even if he were made out of plasticine.
The Lancastrian animator, now 46, has, following five years of intense labour, been lured away from his Bristol studio to help promote Wallace and Gromit's first feature outing. After going to the moon in A Grand Day Out (1989), rubbing up against a sinister penguin in The Wrong Trousers (1993) and frustrating sheep wranglers in A Close Shave (1995), the breezy inventor and his austerely intelligent dog now encounter a terrifying lupine fiend in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Our heroes have formed a security firm named Anti-Pesto to protect the vegetables in their post-war northern locale from the attentions of rabbits. All goes well until Wallace, once again pushing the boundaries of science towards a lunatic frontier, gets his molecules mixed up with one of the captured bunnies.
It is a delight to report that the new picture has all the cosy charm of the earlier efforts. That the ambience remains unaltered is particularly impressive when you consider that Aardman Animation, the Bristol-based studio Park joined in 1985, is now manacled to the mighty DreamWorks.
"We were very keen in this movie to keep the feel of the short films," he says. "We wanted to make sure our work still feels like that of a cottage industry. And it is a cottage industry still. Working before the cameras in clay it is hard to industrialise it. Up until now everybody thought that our films were made by a couple of blokes in a shed in Bristol and we want it to continue to look like that. Though there were actually about 250 people involved in making this."
Jeffrey Katzenberg, the DreamWorks animation supremo, visited the Aardman studios once a month or so throughout the production of Were-Rabbit, but Park insists that he never sought to alter the tone of the work. "He has always made it clear that he is an Aardman fan and he is very respectful. We have a unique deal with DreamWorks, I think, in that we have complete artistic freedom."
Nonetheless, Katzenberg did feel the need to tweak certain situations and phrases for his American audience. It has already been reported that the vegetable marrow Gromit is growing for an upcoming agricultural show - and which generates near erotic devotion from the hitherto stoic canine - will be referred to as a melon on the other side of the Atlantic.
What else puzzled Katzenberg? "Oh there is this one bit where Gromit is driving Wallace home through the woods and Wallace says: 'Slow down, for pity's sake, you'll buckle me trunions.' They had some trouble with that." Who wouldn't? Is a trunion some kind of Northern genital? "It's to do with the old drum brakes. I probably wouldn't understand it either. But does it really matter if you don't quite get it? We have bought American culture wholesale for a century. Surely they can cope with a few of these things."
Park still comes across like the zealous young hobbyist he surely was when he began experimenting with stop-motion films in his dad's garden shed in Preston, Lancashire. Roger Park, an architectural photographer, had passed a motion picture camera on to his son, little knowing that the apparatus's ability to expose individual frames would help develop one of British cinema's most singular talents.
Nick's first-ever film - a brief cartoon about a drunken rat - never came back from the developers. Undeterred, he moved into plasticine and, even now, with DreamWorks' digital toy-shop at his disposal, he has stayed true to the medium.
"I was always wanting to make things out of plasticine. That was the only thing I was any good at," he says slightly mournfully. "I wasn't any good at academic subjects. Well, I suppose I liked English. I liked telling stories and then I discovered animation. I emulated Terry Gilliam's stuff for Monty Python first. I always liked slightly rough-looking animation and plasticine is very good for that."
After school, Park studied at Sheffield Polytechnic and then at the National Film and Television School, where he began work on A Grand Day Out. In other interviews he has suggested that Wallace, the sweet-natured, but slightly batty inventor, has touches of the animator's late father about him, while Gromit - practical, determined, solitary - reminds him of himself.
"I have never modelled characters on people, but sometimes, in retrospect, I see the similarities. I always thought that Wallace was like my dad. He was very ambitious. He was always pottering about, always inventing. He had a very positive attitude to life. He didn't much look like Wallace and he wasn't a stupid man at all. He wasn't as insensitive as Wallace. But, sometimes, when animating him I see a bit of my father coming through."
In A Grand Day Out the interior of the rocket that Wallace builds for his lunar explorations is decked out like a 1950s parlour. "Some time later I remembered that my dad had built this caravan from scratch when we were kids. It was a really hideous looking box thing with square windows and wallpaper - like the rocket has - and these bunk-beds. I suddenly realised I had made a film about my dad without knowing it."
Fans will be more intrigued by the parallels between Gromit and his creator. Many profiles have unkindly caricatured Park as an über-nerd. A single man with few apparent interests outside his work, Nick certainly doesn't come across as the most glamorous of individuals.
Like Gromit, he is competent, intelligent and sensible. But do we tend to find both of them where the fun is not? When the penguin is playing dance music in his gay, fishy bedroom, is Nick grumbling restlessly in the shed with Gromit? "I was always told that when I was a kid I was very quiet and just used to observe from the sideline," Park says. "I didn't speak until later than normal kids. I have that sensitivity that Gromit has. He's put upon. He is the one you sympathise with. But 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."
At any rate, whether it was a metaphor for the divided psyche or just an amiable romp, A Grand Day Out managed to connect with the world in the early 1990s. The Wrong Trousers, which won Park his second Oscar, was even more successful. When did he realise he had unleashed a phenomenon? "I think when I realised they were asking questions about us on University Challenge," he laughs. "I was the answer to one once - and the guy even got it right. My parents used to watch all the afternoon quizzes and phone up and say: 'You were on Fifteen-to-One and The Weakest Link today.'"
The pictures fitted neatly into that school of English humour which celebrates quiet decency: Dad's Army, the films of Ealing studios, the monologues of Joyce Grenfell. Along the way they revitalised the fortunes of Wensleydale Cheese - Wallace's crumbly snack of choice - and established Aardman Films as an unlikely force in world cinema.
Park is now so closely associated with the company, which created the loveable Morph for the BBC in the 1970s, that many people wrongly believe him to be one of its founders.
"Yes people often do get that wrong," he agrees. "But in fact they were a great influence on me. Before I came there, they had been doing very interesting things with recording real people in pubs and so on and then using them for animation. They did an amazing piece called Down and Out and that was even before I joined the company."
Down and Out led to the fine Creature Comforts, in which Park and his colleagues at Aardman used interviews with members of the public as the voice tracks for delightful animations of animals. The film picked up an Oscar and led to that famous advertising campaign for Heat Electric (if you still think it was for British Gas, then stand in the corner). Though Aardman's record is impressive, one suspects that it was Park that Katzenberg was really after when he signed the company up for a five-picture deal. As it happens, that contract did not bring him Wallace and Gromit - characters Park owns outright - and Were-Rabbit was negotiated in a separate transaction.
The first picture in the deal was 2000's Chicken Run, which, while not winning audiences over as convincingly as Wallace and Gromit did, still broke the $100 million barrier at the box-office. Katzenberg, currently under fire for promoting unrealisable expectations for other DreamWorks pictures, has, perhaps wisely, been talking down Were-Rabbit's economic prospects in the United States.
Be that as it may, the picture will almost certainly boost Nick Park's profile further. It seems unlikely that he will let it go to his head. He does not have a speedboat or a private plane or a swimming pool. He has no fancy celebrity girlfriends. So, what on earth does he do with his money? He muses.
"I bought a house, I suppose." Some sort of gaudy mansion? "No, it is a three-bedroom house in Bristol. It's larger than it looks on the outside - like a Tardis. But I am happy with it. I have that house. I have a car. I really don't like that thing where when you get successful you have to buy all this stuff."
So what else could he possibly want from life? Oh yes, biscuits. When the requested dainties eventually turn up, they turn out to be those delicate butter shortbread things with unnecessarily intricate icing. Park peers at them rather suspiciously. He has the look of a man who was really hoping for a garibaldi or a custard cream.
Wallace and Gromit - The Curse of the Were-Rabbit is released next Friday
