Creature Comforts (1989)
Directed by Nick Park
A humorous and thought-provoking view of what animals in zoos might be thinking about their captivity and surroundings.
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What critics compared Creature Comforts to
In some ways "Madagascar" is a spiritual descendant of another kind of animated cartoon, clay animation wizard Nick Park's 1990 Oscar-winning "Creature Comforts," which had zoo animals talking feelingly about their lot in life.
The fox and hare investigate a yoga retreat run by a hippie yak (Tommy Chong) with a halo of flies; they track down a Hispanic-accented jaguar (Jesse Corti, in what I'd hope is a tribute to the accent of the bored jaguar in Nick Park's "Creature Comforts").
And if the filmmakers are guilty of borrowing, they borrow from the best - witness a Greek chorus of penguin chicks straight out of Aardman's "Creature Comforts."
Granted, codirectors David Bowers and Sam Fell, both of who share story credit with two of the film's five credited screenwriters, are debuting directors, but Aardman's Nick Park scored two Oscar nominations and one win for his first two shorts back in 1989 ("A Grand Day Out," Wallace and Gromit's introduction, and "Creature Comforts").
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Park won his first Oscar for "Creature Comforts," deadpan interviews with hyper-articulate zoo animals.
The first full-length feature from Aardman Studios, creators of the absurdly dry Wallace & Gromit shorts as well as the sublime Creature Comforts, Chicken Run is essentially a remake of The Great Escape except here it's corpulent hens looking for freedom from a muddy and dank egg farm in the British outlands.
(I have a toy model of one sitting in front of me as I write this, so, yes, I'll bet you do.) Park had already nailed three Academy Awards in the animation category for his work on two Wallace & Gromit shorts -- 1996's A Close Shave and 1994's The Wrong Trousers -- as well as an earlier work from 1991, the sublime talking-animal gag Creature Comforts.
Nick Park has already won three Oscars for his short animated films Creature Comforts , The Wrong Trousers , and A Close Shave , the latter two starring the Wallace and Gromit characters.
Beginning with the Academy Award-winning 1989 short Creature Comforts, and through his epic Wallace and Gromit mini-adventures The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave, Park has filled the mouths of his staunchly English, valiantly middle-class players clay-animated penguins and sheep as well as ladies and gents with soulful choppers: In good times and bad, the set of an Aardman jaw speaks volumes as said penguin, sheep, dog, woman, or man adapts with tea-and-toast-loving civility to unpredictable (and usually daunting) fate.
Three Aardman shorts by Nick Park -- Creature Comforts and two half-hour shorts with the cheese-loving Wallace and his wise dog, Gromit -- have already won Academy Awards.