A self-described control freak, Nick Park is a hands-on guy, and he'd rather you knew it. More than 20 years after he first sculpted Wallace and Gromit out of Plasticine, Park is a triple Oscar winner (twice for W&G shorts) and co-director of the blockbusting Chicken Run, now hitting theaters with the first feature-length Wallace and Gromit adventure, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. But although Park now heads a staff of 30 animators and the telltale smoosh of Plasticine has been replaced by a harder proprietary blend, he still likes to let the fingerprints show. "When people see the fingerprints, they really connect," Park says during a Philadelphia stop. "Everyone played with clay."

Although Park calls himself "quite ambitious," he was clearly intent that Were-Rabbit keep the herky-jerky feel of the three previous shorts. Although the movie's stop-motion is frequently embellished with computer graphics, you'd never know it, since Park and co-director Steve Box kept the digital effects deliberately crude. For the movie's titular monster, a vegetable-scarfing beast that threatens Wallace and Gromit's pest-control business, Park says they "could have found the budget" for "really convincing fur effects," but they opted to keep it rough. "There's something too silky-smooth about CG sometimes that really wouldn't have matched," Park says. Like the stop motion, the CG sequences were shot "double frames," that is, 12 frames a second instead of 24, to give them a "more chunky" feel.

It's clear Park and his best-known creation share a love of ornate contraptions. Wallace's inventions, which this time out include a rodent vacuum and a brain-switching machine, are jury-rigged monstrosities that would leave Rube Goldberg in a fog. The artisanal, slightly nostalgic feel of stop motion appeals to Park, and he attributes some of the series' popularity to it as well. "Maybe in these days of technology, people kind of long for something real again," he muses. "It's lucky for me that's the case. We seem to have carved out a niche."

While many of his Aardman Animation cohorts have relocated to DreamWorks' Los Angeles facilities to work on the 2006 rats-in-the-sewer adventure Flushed Away, Park pines for the days of showing shorts at animation festivals. "Anything that means promoting the movie and will attract media, that's the priority now," he sighs. Still, the larger canvas has its perks. "I do miss the hands-on thing," Park says, "but I have had a hand in designing all the characters: doing the original sculpts, and keeping everybody looking like the same kind of species. You don't get to do all the animation, but you get to control much more of a bigger thing."