Nick Park's 'Creature Comforts (1989)' beat out competition from the likes of Bruno Bozzetto and Nick Park to win the 1991 Oscar for Best Animated Short. In all honesty, I haven't seen nominee 'Cavallette (1990),' but I still think that the Academy got their ballots mixed up. Just for the record, I find 'A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit (1989)' to be the much better short film, with an entertaining, fully-structured narrative and no shortage of imagination. 'Creature Comforts' has a nice premise and some good jokes, but it's all over so very quickly, leaving only a shallow impression that doesn't bode well for repeat viewings. Nevertheless, the animal characters have that wonderful home-grown "Wallace and Gromit" look about them, always a lovely trademark of Aardman Animations, as well as charming British accents that add some sophistication to the zoo inhabitants' gripes. I've always wondered why the British have inherently sophisticated accents.This five-minute short film is basically just a series of very brief vignettes in which zoo animals are interviewed for their opinions on life in captivity. Some animals have some good things to say about it, but most do nothing but complain, particularly a certain South American carnivore who goes on at length about the "lack of space" in his enclosure. There's a family of polar bears who are eager to get their opinions across, and miss having steak in their diets. I also liked the turtle that "tries to spend as little time in here as possible," although that is more easily said than done. The quaintness of the dialogue is probably due to the filming technique, which was to interview zoo visitors off the street, request that they behave like animals, and produce the animation around these results. In 2003, 'Creature Comforts' was expanded into a successful TV series, though the even greater success of the "Wallace and Gromit" franchise validates, I think, my feelings about which is the better film.

Before the "Wallace & Gromit" series and "Chicken Run", Nick Park made a splendid debut with "Creature Comforts", in which several animals in a zoo explain how unhappy they are to be in cages. If the cartoon is goofy, then they play it to good effect, and it has a good message. I've always thought that Nick Park not only has great ideas for cartoons, but that his claymation style is quite neat, with the bug eyes and rectangular mouths.Other interesting cartoons of this style include not only the "Wallace & Gromit" series, but also "Wat's Pig" and "Ident". The last two are fascinating, if bizarre.

If there's any single short out there that marked a real defining point for those claymation whiz kids down at Aardman, I'd say 'Creature Comforts' is the one. The debut piece of the now legendary Nick Park (who'd go on to create a series of captivating short films featuring a certain cheese-loving inventor and his well-read canine cohort, whose names I'm sure you don't need me to spell out for you here), it's now a widely-regarded classic in stop motion animation history, and there are some pretty good reasons for that. No other Aardman project, great as they frequently are, has managed to combine such high levels of whimsy, charm and poignancy quite as deftly as this one. The bright idea of taking real-life recordings with members of the public and aligning them with talking plasticine animals in the style of vox pop interviews (in this case, zoo animals commenting on their general living conditions, as extracted from discussions with residents of retirement homes, council housing and student halls) was so fresh, so ingenious and so delightful that the five minute running time designated here simply wasn't enough. It was a concept which begged to be extended, and it spawned a much-deserved franchise in the early 90s with TV ads for the UK's Heat Electric and, more recently, a long-awaited TV series in 2003. A franchise which in turn helped to establish Aardman's now-firm reputation for colourful, offbeat cosiness, as opposed to some of the more downbeat and sombre shorts they'd been working on for much of the 80s (many of which were good enough in their own right - Peter Lord's 'Going Equipped', which debuted alongside 'Creature Comforts' in the Channel 4 series 'Lip Synch, in particular is more than worth a look).Compared to a lot of the output that followed it, the animation here may look a little primitive by today's standards (the depressed gorilla, for example, is quite clearly riddled with the animator's finger prints), but it's an easily forgivable fault, and doesn't detract from the visual joy that this short is swimming in from start to finish. Get a load of all those wonderful sight gags - the elderly bush-baby's gigantic magnified pupils, the unidentified birds with beaks held on by elastic bands (the antics of the non-speaking characters hovering about in the background have always been something to keep an eye out for in the 'Creature Comforts' realm), the treadmill-running terrapins, the dozens of shrieking, flailing baby rodents…all of it gold. Earning Nick Park an Oscar in 1990 for his efforts, it's endearing and comical to the bone - and yet there's also a mild tinge of sadness to it that I doubt 'Creature Comforts' would have been nearly as memorable without. For all the quirky cuteness that those clay-built critters possess, the anguish of a few of the original speakers remains persistent in their voices, and shines through in their pertaining characters quite dynamically. Most of the animals, it would seem, are perfectly contented with their lives in captivity, but there are a few who feel the sting of alienation, the homesick wild cat from Brazil being the standout personality on this one - the high range of exaggerated mannerisms that Park uses to bring him to life are unforgettable.A lovely film and a wonderful concept, what makes 'Creature Comforts' such a striking experience is, in part, how it touches upon some of the helplessness and frustrations of having to live in a world you feel out of place in. It's also a whole lot of fun too.Grade: A

'Creature Comforts' is a nice early work from the creator of the 'Wallace & Gromit'-shorts and the animated feature 'Chicken Run'. It shows a couple of animals in a zoo being interviewed. They tell what they like and dislike in the zoo and their cages. Especially a certain predator gets a lot of laughs while he is talking about the space he needs.Director Nick Park won an Oscar for this short film and it is not hard to see why. It is not only funny, but very well made as well. He developed his technique further with 'Wallace & Gromit' and 'Chicken Run', but 'Creature Comforts' already showed what Park was capable of. A terrific animated short, highly recommended.