Nicholas Wulstan Park (born 6 December 1958) is an English filmmaker, animator, and voice actor who created Wallace & Gromit, Creature Comforts, Chicken Run, and Shaun the Sheep. Park has been nominated for an Academy Award seven times and won four with Creature Comforts (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993), A Close Shave (1995) and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005). He also was the co-director, co-producer, and storyboard artist of Early Man (2018) and provided vocal sound effects for Hognob, a dog-like warthog who has dog behaviors, also Dug's pet warthog.
He has also received seven BAFTA Awards, including the BAFTA for Best Short Animation for A Matter of Loaf and Death, which was believed to be the most-watched television programme in the United Kingdom in 2008. His 2000 film Chicken Run is the highest-grossing stop motion animated film.
In 1985 Park joined Aardman Animations, based in Bristol, and for his work in animation he was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Peter Blake to appear in a 2012 version of Blake's most famous artwork - the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover - to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life.
Park was appointed a CBE by Queen Elizabeth II in the 1997 Birthday Honours for "services to the animated film industry".
Nicholas Wulstan Park was born on 6 December 1958 in Preston, Lancashire, to seamstress Mary Cecilia (née Ashton; 1930-2020) and Roger Wulstan Park (1925–2004), an architectural photographer. The middle child of five siblings, he grew up in Penwortham; the family later moved to Walmer Bridge. His sister Janet lives in Longton, Lancashire. He attended Cuthbert Mayne High School (now Our Lady's Catholic High School).
Park grew up with a keen interest in drawing cartoons, and as a 13-year-old, he made films with the help of his mother, her home film camera and cotton bobbins. He also took after his father, an amateur inventor, and would submit to Blue Peter homemade items such as a bottle that squeezed out different coloured wools.
He studied Communication Arts at Sheffield City Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University) and then went to the National Film and Television School, where he started making the first Wallace and Gromit film, A Grand Day Out.
In 1985, Park joined the staff of Aardman Animations in Bristol, where he worked as an animator on commercial products (including the dance scene involving oven-ready chickens for the music video for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer"). He also had a part in animating the Penny cartoons from the first season of Pee-wee's Playhouse, which featured Paul Reubens as his character Pee-wee Herman.
Along with all this, he had finally completed A Grand Day Out, and with that in post-production, he made Creature Comforts as his contribution to a series of shorts called "Lip Synch". Creature Comforts matched animated zoo animals with a soundtrack of people talking about their homes. The two films were nominated for a host of awards. A Grand Day Out won the first BAFTA Award, and Creature Comforts won his first Academy Award.
In 1990, Park worked alongside advertising agency GGK to develop a series of highly acclaimed television advertisements for the "Heat Electric" campaign. The Creature Comforts advertisements are now regarded as among the best advertisements ever shown on British television, as voted (independently) by viewers of the United Kingdom's main commercial channels ITV and Channel 4.
Two more Wallace and Gromit shorts, The Wrong Trousers (1993) and A Close Shave (1995), followed, both winning Academy Awards. He then made his first feature-length film, Chicken Run (2000), co-directed with Aardman founder Peter Lord. He also supervised a new series of Creature Comforts films for British television in 2003.
His second theatrical feature-length film and first Wallace and Gromit feature, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, was released on 5 October 2005, and on 6 March 2006 it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at the 78th Academy Awards.
On 10 October 2005, a fire gutted one of Aardman Animations' archive warehouses. The fire resulted in the loss of some of Park's creations, including the models and sets used in the movie Chicken Run. Some of the original Wallace and Gromit models and sets, as well as the master prints of the finished films, were elsewhere and survived.
In 2007 and 2008, Park's work included a United States version of Creature Comforts, a weekly television series that was on CBS every Monday evening at 8 pm ET. In the series, Americans were interviewed about a range of subjects. The interviews were lip-synced to Aardman animal characters.
In September 2007, it was announced that Park had been commissioned to design a bronze statue of Wallace and Gromit, which will be placed in his hometown of Preston. In October 2007, it was announced that the BBC had commissioned another Wallace and Gromit short film to be entitled Trouble at Mill (retitled later to A Matter of Loaf and Death).
Park studied at Preston College, which has since named its library for the art and design department after him: the Nick Park Library Learning Centre. He is the recipient of a gold Blue Peter badge.
By the beginning of 2010, Park had won four Academy Awards, and had the distinction of having won an Academy Award every time he had been nominated (his only loss being when he was nominated twice in the same category). This streak ended in the 2010 Oscars when A Matter of Loaf and Death failed to win the best animated short Academy Award.
Park had his first acting role in February 2011, voicing himself in a cameo on The Simpsons episode "Angry Dad: The Movie". In the episode, the fictional Park's new Willis and Crumble short, Better Gnomes and Gardens, is a parody of Wallace and Gromit.