E-Mail This Article to a Friend CLAY CHIC Nick Park, one frame at a time BY BRETT MICHEL

More than 15 years after giving collegiate stoners the munchies for crackers and cheese at animation festivals in Davis Square, Oscar-winning animation director Nick Park finally unveils Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the first feature-length film starring the eccentric inventor and his cunning canine companion. What took so bloody long, you say? You try coming up with an hour-and-a-half movie about a "veg-ravishing beast" and the two pest-control heroes who set out to destroy it, molding each character from clay and shooting them at 24 frames per second.

"Even though we were filming for nearly two years, there was a long lead-up, with design, and three years in the writing, and we were writing and designing characters at the same time," says Park as he sits in a cozy conference room at Boston’s Ritz Hotel, the second stop of a whirlwind press tour.

The new flick opens on the heels of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, a dazzling merger of age-old stop-motion and bleeding-edge digital-animation techniques. Compared to the antiseptic sheen of Corpse Bride, animators’ fingerprints showing up in the clay are part of Wallace & Gromit’s charm. Still, Park had to pay a bit more attention to detail for the duo’s Hollywood debut. And claymation fans will be shocked to know that Aardman, Park’s longtime studio, has at least one computer-animated feature in the works, next year’s Flushed Away.

"A lot of water is involved — it’s kind of The African Queen in the sewers of London, with a cast of rats", Park says, defending his clay abandonment. "It seemed we were going to combine the two — CG water and models — but then, combining these is more expensive than doing it all in CG. It was a cost thing, really."

So he’s not going to go all Pixar on us. But what about the stop-action rivalry between the goth-drenched Burton epic and a cheery man-and-dog comedy? The soft-spoken Brit actually pulled a bit of Hollywood skullduggery — hiring his rival’s girlfriend. Helena Bonham Carter, who has a son with Tim Burton, actually voices the lead female character in both movies.

"When Helena came in to record, we had been picking her brains about Corpse Bride, and she would tell us Tim says, ‘Oh, you’ve gone to work for the enemy’. It’s all in good fun though." 5FD5E3AB-588F-11D4-9BA9-005004532BEF-StyleName:BylineBy Brett Michel