Creature Comforts

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.

'Creature Comforts (1989)' is absolutely brilliant. Taking the audio from real interviews with the public and transposing it onto talking animals is nothing short of genius. It recontextualizes the characters' answers and gives them a new meaning that fits with the flick's subtle anti-zoo messaging. More importantly, it makes both elements - the audio and the animation - much funnier. The juxtaposition between the very normal, unrehearsed dialogue and the wonderfully fluid, somewhat silly stop-motion animation is brilliant. It has such a distinct effect. The short truly is remarkable; it's no wonder that the concept was explored in a television series (also brilliant) soon after. If you ever needed even more poof that the people at Aardman (and Nick Park, in particular) are some of the most important creators of animated content in the last thirty-five years (on top of Wallace and Gromit, Shaun The Sheep and Chicken Run, that is), then look no further than this, one of their earliest efforts. The talent was clearly there right from the start. This is a seminal stop-motion short and I highly recommend it. 8/10.

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!

this is a short claymation movie from the makers of "wallace and Gromit" shorts and the full length major motion picture "chicken run." To the uninformed, this is a collection of brief interviews with zoo animals about their daily habits, and religion, feed habits, etc. but, what is really going on here is even better. The makers of this movie went to nursing homes and recorded interviews with the residents, Then animated animals for the voices. So, really when you watch this you are listening to the views of elderly people as animals. I personally find this to be a very interesting idea. 10 all the way