A Category That Could Result in ‘A Close Shave’

In the kitchen of Aardman Animations’ offices in London, there’s a cabinet weighed down with all the awards the company has won in the past few years, including two Academy Awards for best animated short film, and some 30 other awards for one of those Oscar winners, “The Wrong Trousers.”

As Nick Park, the man responsible for a good many of those trophies, says, “It’s a pretty heavy cabinet. It’ll kill someone if it falls off the wall.”

Park may have another impressive tchotchke to make that cabinet even more deadly after the Academy Awards ceremony next Monday. His latest effort, “A Close Shave,” is nominated, and consider his batting average: He has been nominated three times, and the only short that didn’t win lost to one of his other films. Still, Park is up against some heavy-hitters this year, including no less a personage than Mickey Mouse in “Runaway Brain,” his first short in years.

“I’m sewing the sequins on my tuxedo right now,” Park says drolly of his preparations for the big night, adding that he still feels the odd man out at the Oscars despite two prior visits.

“It’s very nice to be there, seeing all the faces you only see on TV and in the cinema, but it’s nerve-racking,” he says. “I feel very much out of place. I’m just playing with Plasticine [known more popularly as clay in America] in a room one minute, and the next I’m sitting next to Naomi Campbell.”

Park’s claymation characters are far more low-key than the average animated dervishes--if it’s possible to have deadpan cartoon characters, Park’s invented them. Wallace and Gromit, a proper British gentleman with an affinity for cheese and tinkering around the house, and his long-suffering pet pooch, are his heroes of choice--they’ve appeared in two of his previous films, as well as “A Close Shave,” and are one-for-two in their Oscar bids. (Gromit, he explains, is the term for a small rubber ring used in electrical insulation; he learned the term from his electrician brother and just liked the way the word sounded.)

In “A Close Shave,” Wallace falls in love while Gromit is sent to prison, framed for sheep-napping. In the Oscar-and-everything-else-winning “Wrong Trousers,” Wallace takes in a boarder--a sinister penguin planning an elaborate diamond heist--leaving Gromit out in the cold until it’s time to save the day. In “A Grand Day Out,” the two build a rocket ship and head for the moon, only to be pursued by a crazed, coin-operated robotic ashcan. His other Oscar winner, “Creature Comforts,” was made after he interviewed folks about their thoughts on living in England; as seen in the film itself, the interviewees are zoo animals discussing park conditions.

“I use things I liked from movies, like the Hitchcock element,” Park, who nonetheless insists he’s not a huge cineaste, explains. “I just go for the quirky and slightly offbeat, but with a sense of normality to it, a cozy feeling, but hard-edged. I try to avoid too much cuteness.”

Park began animating with his parents’ movie camera at the age of 13; a work he made as a teen aired on national British television. “I thought I had reached the peak of my career,” he admits.

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Greater heights were to come, however. He attended art school, where he began work on “A Grand Day Out,” work that became quite prolonged--”I took 4 1/2 years in a three-year course,” he says. “I couldn’t find a lighting person to stick around long enough--they kept graduating.”

Once he finally did graduate, Aardman offered him a job and offered to help him finish his opus, which took another four years. He subsequently made “Creature Comforts” and “The Wrong Trousers” on his own with Aardman’s blessings. “A Close Shave,” however, became a much more involved process--in what was planned as a test run for a full-length feature (Aardman is in negotiations with a couple of Hollywood studios), Park oversaw what a team of other animators created, merely animating a small segment of the short himself.

This “factory process” is something that Park, preferring the feel of clay on his fingers, is clearly ambivalent about.

“In a way, I had my finger in more pies and it was stressful in more ways,” Park recalls. “Every character motivation, every expression, every tiny movement has to be talked about. [Wallace and Gromit] are my babies, and it’s hard for people to do what I want, exactly. I’m a bit nervous about them, I know them so well. I learned to ask for what I want more directly--’Make the nose bigger, the eyes should be closer together,’ half your day is spent on that kind of stuff.”

Nonetheless, Park realizes that if he wants to make the jump to feature animation, he will need to delegate authority. In the meantime, there’s the Oscar ceremony to keep him preoccupied. This year, the animator says he won’t feel as much pressure as he did in the past.

“If I don’t win which could easily be the case, I don’t think anyone will think any less of me,” he says. “It’s one of those things where everyone disagrees with the winner anyway. Unless you win, of course, then you believe that you really were the best film.”