Oscar nominations were announced today and there was a stunning upset in the animation category:

And for the first time since the animated feature film category was added in 2001 that no nominees were made using computer-generated imagery. The nominees: the hand-drawn “Howl’s Moving Castle,” and the stop-motion films “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride” and “Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.”

“Wallace & Gromit” creator Nick Park said he was thrilled by the nomination.

“It’s fantastic,” Park said, toasting the nomination with champagne at Heathrow Airport as he waited for a flight to Los Angeles. “You never know with these things. It’s so unpredictable.

“You make the film for its own sake really. You don’t make the film for this reason. It’s just a great bonus.”

I recently discovered that Nick Park’s Oscar-winning short film “Creature Comforts” was expanded into a full TV series in the UK. I recently bought the DVD box set and found it to be a lot of fun, though it doesn’t have the same spark of the original film.

“Curse of the Were-Rabbit” was wonderful, though the shorts (available on DVD) seemed to pack just as much story into 1/3rd the running time.

Hmm…I was going to link you guys to the DVD set, but I really don’t know which one to recommend.
** THIS ONE is out of print (available from resellers) but it features creator commentaries and other goodies.
** THIS ONE that is currently available does not feature commentaries but it is much cheaper.
** You can also get it as a box set packaged with the new Curse of the Were-Rabbit movie. However, this is the FULL-SCREEN version of the movie, not widescreen! YE BE WARNED.
**As for this other out of print one…HEY! I own this one…and now it’s going for $90? Time to sell it, I think.