Nick Park – answers
1 People’s perception of what is possible with animation.
2 Those who are genuine pioneers in the business (of film).
3 As ‘probably the biggest single factor in animated films since Disney’.
4 He says he ‘thinks breathes and eats films and movies.’
5 He says they have character, good photography and interesting camera angles
6 The film company Aardman Animations were ‘behind’ these films – ‘behind’ meaning they backed them financially. Aardman Animations is a British Animation studio based in Bristol, founded by Peter Lord and David Sproxton in 1976.
7 a) It has made Aardman one of the major success stories of the British Film Industry and b) Nick Park’s animations have won various film awards – 4 Oscars, several Baftas and a South Bank show award.
8 Of plasticine / plasticene – an inexpensive sort of play clay which children use for modelling objects. It usually comes in sets of several colours.
9 The Beano – he says he was a great fan of the Beano. (It influenced his set designs.)
10 Rupert Bear.
11 To be a Beano artist.
12 He says they had something surreal about them, that the drawings of them were fantastic lovely ink drawings.
13 He says they were not animals at all, they were children with animals’ heads. They were both terrifying and attractive
14 Rolling, green, homely, comforting and safe
15 A north that was friendly, eccentric and unmaterialistic, where the biggest ambition was to grow the biggest carrot, not to make a bundle in the city
16 When he started to create his work it was his ‘reference point’.
17 That they didn’t have a lot of money and were ‘not on the cutting edge of fashion’. 18 Ordinary objects such as the toaster and the lampstand.
19 Because they were nice to look at, and had a nice feel to them.
20 As lovely, charming, warm, slightly eccentric and more English than English (ie. exaggeratedly English).
21 It is a place where you might see a pie-eating competition round any corner, or a park-keeper to chase you off for playing on the grass, or someone (‘a commissionaire’?) taking money outside a cinema. It is the world of a child, with some zany features.
22 He was drawing cartoons because he wanted to be a cartoon-strip artist.
23 Firstly, that his mother was given a 1967 a ciné-camera on which you could push the button down for normal running use and up for animation; they were encouraged to use the camera, and thirdly that his father told him how to do animation, suggesting, for instance, two people hitting each other over the head with hammers.
24 Twelve.
25 Walter the Rat, or The Rat And The Beanstalk.