Creature Comforts

Before the "Wallace & Gromit" series and "Chicken Run", Nick Park made a splendid debut with "Creature Comforts", in which several animals in a zoo explain how unhappy they are to be in cages. If the cartoon is goofy, then they play it to good effect, and it has a good message. I've always thought that Nick Park not only has great ideas for cartoons, but that his claymation style is quite neat, with the bug eyes and rectangular mouths.

Other interesting cartoons of this style include not only the "Wallace & Gromit" series, but also "Wat's Pig" and "Ident". The last two are fascinating, if bizarre.

This short won the Oscar for Animated Short, beating another Aardman Studios short, A Grand Day Out. The concept behind its creation is an old one, used by John and Faith Hubley: record conversation and come up with fitting animation. In this case, someone went around interviewing residents of a housing development and the answers were transformed into the answers given to an interviewer by animals in a zoo. Everything here is excellent: animation, dialogue are wonderful. Most definitely worth getting. In print on more than one source: a compilation titled Creature Comforts and on The World's Greatest Animation. Highly recommended.

Animals in a zoo talk about their living conditions in this animated short directed by Nick Parks.

It's an excellent piece, a mixture of very funny and very sad. Most of the animals sound like pensioners or little children in their voices and viewpoints, except for one creature -- I think it's a jungle cat of some variety -- saying that he wants space and a tropical climate. It satisfies my criteria for being interesting, amusing, and having something to say about the way the world is actually run.

It's particularly notable as the first film released by Aardman. It also won Nick Parks an Oscar for Best Short Film.

This is the old version of the soon-to-be TV series of Nick Park's Aardman Animations. Basically they record voices from real interviews talking about a certain subject, for example they mention about food and where they are living. When they have recorded these voices they use their genius to match this talking with a suitable character. All the characters are wild and zoo animals talking. There is a lion, tortoises, polar bears, a panda bear, a female gorilla, a hippo (with one behind her pooping) and many other animals made of the genius Plastercine. There is now quite a good TV series of this one-off show of interview made animation. The quality of this animation is obviously the fact that everything moving is made of Plastercine, it deserved the Oscar! As part of Aardman Animations, it was number 15 on The 100 Greatest Cartoons. Very good!

'Creature Comforts' is a nice early work from the creator of the 'Wallace & Gromit'-shorts and the animated feature 'Chicken Run'. It shows a couple of animals in a zoo being interviewed. They tell what they like and dislike in the zoo and their cages. Especially a certain predator gets a lot of laughs while he is talking about the space he needs.

Director Nick Park won an Oscar for this short film and it is not hard to see why. It is not only funny, but very well made as well. He developed his technique further with 'Wallace & Gromit' and 'Chicken Run', but 'Creature Comforts' already showed what Park was capable of. A terrific animated short, highly recommended.