A MUTT and a middle-aged man in a spinach-green tank top have conquered Hollywood, and no one is quite as surprised as their creator.

Nick Park said: “It seems really funny to me. They started life as characters I invented at film school — even their names were so stupid — yet two weeks ago I looked up and saw Wallace and Gromit on a huge poster in Times Square.”

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, the feature film that Park co-directed with Steve Box, went straight to No 1 at the US box office when it was released last week. Rave reviews and the forthcoming half-term mean that it is likely to follow suit here.

The success of the film, and his other feature-length work, Chicken Run, have made Park and his company, Aardman Animations, the most — maybe the only — world- beating part of the British film industry that has not yet been exported to the States.

Britain’s answer to Hollywood is Aztec West, a featureless industrial estate north of Bristol. Here in Aardman’s studios 350 modellers, animators, set-builders and camera crews spent nearly five years turning Park’s vision into Plasticine.

What they created was a uniquely English world of terraced houses, stately homes, flat caps, silver-haired vicars and fruit-and-veg competitions. The source of Park’s inspiration was his childhood in the 1960s, blended with the humour of Norman Wisdom and the charm of the Ealing comedies. It’s a cosy world that can exist only in cherished memories, and about as far removed from Hollywood as it is possible to get.

Were-Rabbit was made with money from DreamWorks, Steven Spielberg’s production company, which also financed Chicken Run, the third-most successful British film at the US box office. But even Hollywood movie moguls knew better than to interfere with Park’s unique vision.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood, flew in on his private jet every few weeks during filming to make “suggestions”. Directors ignore producers’ “suggestions” at their peril, but Park and his co-director found a solution.

Park said: “We did have tensions, but they turned out to be quite creative. When Jeffrey came up with a suggestion, we’d go away and come up with a better one of our own. But he did make us think and work harder, like the coach in Chariots of Fire.”

Other members of the Hollywood production team were less tactful, suggesting that it might help if some characters had American accents or were younger.

Park said: “One of the complaints was that all the characters were ‘old’. But I knew instictively that to compromise the vision I had could ruin the whole thing.” As Park was learning of Wallace and Gromit’s success in the States, a warehouse back home in Bristol was burning to the ground. It contained the entire “history” of Aardman, including all the surviving sets from the Wallace and Gromit short films.

Park has yet to visit the ruins because he has been out of the country on a promotional tour, but there is not much to see. Firefighters have told Aardman that there is no chance of salvaging anything.

Aardman was founded in 1972 by two schoolfriends, Peter Lord and David Sproxton, who began making animated films with a borrowed 16mm camera.

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