The advertisements received critical acclaim within the advertising industry – with Park, Rylance and Cardwell picking up many top creative awards in Europe and America, including "Best Commercial of the Year" in the 1991 British Television Advertising Awards and "Most Outstanding European Campaign" in the 1991 D&AD Europe Awards. The campaign was a great success and its run was extended over three years. Morris appealed especially to older audiences, who would remember him and his animal conversations on the television programme Animal Magic. These features were rounded off by a gentle closing voiceover spoken by Johnny Morris. The characterisation was strengthened by having each voice carefully matched to a suitable animal in a combination that would produce a memorable impact. The animations had an unusual expressiveness, with the wit often coming from tiny nuances – such as a dog scratching his ear at a particular moment. There was a certain charm about the animations, with their quirky humour and sharpness of observation – such as in the antics of the non-speaking characters and in the odd little things happening in the background. The adverts' warm and cosy tone reflected the warmth and homeliness of central heating. The selected interviewees spoke in a range of down-to-earth regional accents, and the overall effect was of natural conversation. The characters' dialogue was obtained by taking tape recordings of everyday people talking about the comfort and benefits of the electrical appliances in their homes and then using extracts of these – complete with pauses, false starts, repetitions, hesitations and unscripted use of language (such as "easily turn off and on able"). The characters were seen in their own domestic settings, chatting to an unseen interviewer behind a large microphone. The series featured a variety of endearing plasticine animals, including a tortoise, a cat, a family of penguins and a Brazilian parrot. This led to a series.Īlthough there had been a tradition of vox pop advertisements going back to the soap powder adverts of the 1960s, the Creature Comforts series was distinctive in its juxtaposition of real-life dialogue and animated creatures. The initial result of their collaboration was three thirty-seconds Creature Comforts advertisements, made in the same style as the original film. They were convinced that a series of short films modeled on the original film would be ideally suited to television advertising – as long as the advertising was handled with sufficient sensitivity to preserve the integrity and charm of Park's work. The creative team of advertising agency GGK had seen the original Creature Comforts film and were hugely impressed by it. In 1990, Nick Park worked with Phil Rylance and Paul Cardwell to develop a series of British television advertisements for the electricity boards' "Heat Electric" campaign. The polar bears were voiced by a family who owned a local shop, while the Puma was voiced by a Brazilian student who was living in the United Kingdom, but missed his home country. Stop motion animation was then used to animate each character, and the answers given in the interviews were put in the context of zoo animals. The voices of each character were performed by residents of both a housing estate and an old people's home. Rather than the subject being one-sided or biased towards one viewpoint, there is a strong balance of opinions in the film, with some interviewees who are happy with their living situation, some who are not, and some who have a neutral opinion. These include Tracey, a depressed gorilla, a Brazilian puma, a mother opossum, and a young hippopotamus who complain about the cold weather, the poor quality of their enclosures and the lack of space and freedom.īy contrast, a tarsier, Alex, a former circus chicken, a turtle, and an armadillo praise their enclosures for the comfort and security they bring, and a family of polar bears, particularly one named Andrew, talk about both the advantages and disadvantages of zoos for the welfare of animals. The film shows various animals in a zoo being interviewed about their living conditions. The film won Nick Park the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1990. It was produced as part of a series called Lip Synch for Channel 4. The original Creature Comforts short film was five minutes and a few seconds long and was conceived and directed by Nick Park and produced by Aardman Animations, featuring the voices of British non-actors in the same vein as the "man on the street" Vox Pop interviews.
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