Nick Park
Animator & Director
Four-time Oscar-winning creator of Wallace & Gromit and the guiding hand of Aardman’s clay animation. In 2025 he said the studio would “embrace the technology” of AI — but cautiously, never at the expense of its handmade values.
In his words
We want to embrace the technology and find in what ways it’s going to be useful to us, maybe to do animation a bit quicker, but we’re going to be very cautious not to lose our values.
The clay is our USP and we pride ourselves in that. Authenticity is the most important thing. It’s where the charm is.
Biography
Nick Park (born 1958) is a British stop-motion animator and the creative heart of Aardman Animations, the Bristol studio behind Wallace & Gromit, Shaun the Sheep, and Chicken Run. His fingerprint-in-the-clay style has won him four Academy Awards, making him one of the most decorated animators alive.
Cautious embrace
Asked in late 2025 how Aardman would respond to generative AI, Park did not reach for outright rejection. He acknowledged that “a lot of people will be fearing for their jobs” and said the studio wanted to understand where the technology might genuinely help — perhaps to speed animation — while guarding what makes its films distinctive.
He framed AI as the latest in a long line of technological shocks the studio has weathered. “When Toy Story came out, we thought, ‘How long have we got?’ But we’ve managed to survive CGI,” he said, noting that the arrival of computer animation only deepened public affection for hand-shaped clay. AI, he added, “is a whole new thing” — but one to be met with curiosity rather than fear.
That measured optimism places Park among the pro-AI voices in animation, though a distinctly conservative one: his enthusiasm is bounded by an insistence that authenticity and the visible human touch remain non-negotiable.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/nick-park