Nick Park's career started as a child. He became enraptured with the long-running English kids' comic book "The Beano," doodling cartoons of his own as soon as he knew how to hold a pencil. "I just loved creating a little comic world," he said in a phone conversation.
He was soft-spoken and rather introverted as a child _ just as he is now at 59. "My mother said I was always very quiet. She said in any social situation I would be always on the sideline, observing people. I would draw things I saw. I remember seeing a documentary when I was a kid about Walt Disney and about how it all started with his drawing this mouse. That fired me up and made me think, 'I want to do this. I want to create characters people will know one day.'"
He got far more than he wished for. A four-time Oscar winner for his stop-motion animated comedies, Park is known worldwide and across generations as the creator of Wallace and Gromit, the best man-and-dog Claymation comedy team in cinema history.
It took a while. He didn't make any money until he was 29, but over the next three decades, "things slightly evolved," he said modestly. For his latest endeavor, he directed, co-wrote and voiced a character in "Early Man," an absurdist story about prehistoric soccer teams.
"I've had cave men in my DNA from the beginning," he said. They have been an enduring fascination since Park saw "One Million Years B.C." which was "my favorite film when I was 11 years old."
It was the film's battling dinosaurs and volcanoes that captured his imagination, rather than Raquel Welch's famous fur bikini, he said. "I was too young to notice her at the time. I was obsessed by the dinosaurs."
He used his mom's home movie camera to begin animating clay dinosaurs. He entered the BBC's animation competition at 15, not winning but impressing the network enough that they asked to show his work.
In "Early Man," Park pulls away from his best known creations to focus on new individuals and a new world of ancient monsters, meteors and erupting lava. "I just fancied a new challenge," he said. "I wanted something to go a new direction, that takes a lot of work and is quite a high risk. It's also what is so inviting as well."
The biggest challenge in creating characters that nobody knows is getting viewers invested in those characters early in the movie, he said. In one of the opening scenes, two dinosaurs stop fighting when a new menace appears, embracing each other in fright. It was staged as a tribute to the work of Ray Harryhausen, the visual effects wizard behind, among many other movies, "One Million Years B.C."
"We called the dinosaurs Ray and Harry," Park said.
As the director of animated films, Park not only guides the vocal cast (with Tom Hiddleston and Eddie Redmayne leading the ensemble in "Early Man") but oversees scores of animators and even dresses in costumes to play out scenes for a story reel. "It's to convey what I'm after by acting it out physically," he said. In the new film he does the squealing voice of a wild boar, and he wore a pig-hair vest while plucking at a harp to demonstrate how he wanted the hog's musical interlude to proceed.
"I'm an auteur," Park said with a laugh. "This way I can say I want this movement at this speed, I want to hold that look for this long, make sure this beat works."
"Early Man" is the most technically ambitious project Park has tackled, creating backgrounds for the puppet figures in the foreground with digital effects of big crowds and vast landscapes. "Fire, water, clouds you can't do with clay," he said.
The filmmakers complete about one minute of animated footage a day. As a result, the movie took three years to shoot. That is an eternity in the view of many filmmakers. But slow and steady is how Park prefers to create his films. He ended a five-year contract with Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks studio in the early 2000s after they created the critical and commercial smash "Chicken Run" because he wanted to do things his way and at his pace.
"All things worthwhile take time, I guess, don't they? Sometimes you get frustrated because these things are such long-haul projects, a really long journey throughout each project. On every feature you long for the days when you had two or three characters. A man who speaks, and a silent dog. And a penguin."
