Nick Park – questions

1 What does the artist and TV-presenter Rolf Harris consider Nick Park must have changed?
2 Jeffrey Katzenberg, from the Hollywood studio company Dreamworks, describes Nick Park as belonging to a particular handful of people. Who are these people?
3 How does Peter Sallis, the voice of Wallace, describe Nick Park?
4 How does David Sproxton, one of the co-founders of the studio company Aardman Animations, describe Park’s love of this medium?
5 What three features does Ray Harryhausen (a pioneer in animation) pick out from Nick Park’s films?
6 Who put up the finance for such films as ‘Creature Comforts‘ and ‘Wallace and Gromit?’
7 Nick Park’s work helped to make Aardman highly successful – can you supply any of the details given of its success?
8 What are the figures in Park’s animations made of?

9 What is the name of the children’s comic that Nick Park mentions liking as a boy?
10 What individual animal character from a comic does he also mention from the same time in his life?
11 What was Nick Park’s ambition as a ten-year-old?
12 Can you give any details about what Nick Park appreciated about the drawings of Rupert Bear comic characters?
13 How does he describe these creatures?
14 Can you pick out two adjectives Bragg uses about the English countryside?
15 Both Nick Park and Melvyn Bragg are northerners – from the north of England. Nick Park was brought up in Preston, Lancashire, and Melvyn Bragg was born in Wigton, Cumbria, in the Lake District. Can you describe the north of England which Melvyn Bragg outlines?
16 Park says his grandmother lived in a street in a ‘Coronation Street kind of house*’. How did this become significant later in Park’s life?

*meaning it was based in the sort of community life depicted in the TV-soap ‘Coronation Street’, based on the East End of London.

17 What does Nick Park say about money and fashion in his upbringing?
18 What sort of objects did he base his ‘world’ on?
19 Why?
20 How does David Sproxton describe Park’s ‘world’?
21 Peter Lord – the other co-founder of Aardman – has invented a place called ‘Beano Town’. What might you see in this fictitious place?
22 What was Nick Park doing ‘prolifically’ by the age of ten, and why?
23 There were three particular triggers to Nick Park producing his first piece of animation film – can you say what they were?
24 How old was Nick Park at this time?
25 What was the name of his first animation film?

Answers

Vocabulary and notes