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Creature Comforts

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Creature Comforts

Creature Comforts is a British stop-motion comedy franchise originating in a 1989 animated short film of the same name. The film matched animated zoo animals with a soundtrack of people talking about their homes, making it appear as if the animals were being interviewed about their living conditions. It was created by Nick Park and Aardman Animations. The film became the basis of a series of television advertisements for the electricity boards in the United Kingdom. In 2003, a television series in the same style was released. An American version of the series was also made. A sequel series, Things We Love, first aired on BBC One in 2024.

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. It was produced as part of a series called Lip Synch for Channel 4. The film won Nick Park the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1991.

The film shows various animals in a zoo being interviewed about their living conditions. These include a family of polar bears, Tracey, a depressed female gorilla, a Brazilian lion (often resembled a puma), a maternal brown four-eyed opossum, and a hippopotamus calf who complain about the cold weather, the poor quality of their enclosures and the lack of space and freedom.

By contrast, a tarsier, Alex, a former circus chicken, a tortoise, 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. 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.

The voices of each character were performed by residents of both a housing estate and an old people's home. 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 polar bears were voiced by a family who owned a local shop, while the lion was voiced by Nick Park's Brazilian friend. The only credited actress was Julie Sedgewick who voiced the interviewer.

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 creative team of advertising agency GGK had seen the original Creature Comforts film and were hugely impressed by it.

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 initial result of their collaboration was three 30-second Creature Comforts advertisements, made in the same style as the original film. This led to a series.

Although 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 series featured a variety of endearing plasticine animals, including a tortoise, a cat, a family of penguins and a Brazilian parrot. The characters were seen in their own domestic settings, chatting to an unseen interviewer behind a large microphone.

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