Animator Nick Park is the artistic genius behind the new film Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

It's the feature-film debut of Wallace, a brainy British inventor, and his silent best friend, the flop-eared dog Gromit.

It was no simple thing to make the film. Park didn't rely on the computer graphics that have revolutionized animation. This is stop-motion animation, with clay figures and painstaking, frame-by-frame work. There are 115,000 frames of finished footage in the film, and it took five years to complete.

But unlike Wallace & Gromit, Park and his creative team do have feature-length film experience. They scored a major hit with the 2000 escape-movie spoof Chicken Run.

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