Peter Lord Movies

Aardman Features and Sony Pictures Imageworks imagines what the inside of Santa's workshop looks like in this CG-animated family comedy. Peter Baynham and Sarah Smith provide the screenplay, with Smith and Barry Cook taking on the helming duties. ~ Jeremy Wheeler, All Movie Guide

The genesis of the clay-animation "docu-comedy" Creature Comforts was a 1989 theatrical short cocreated by Nick Park of "Wallace and Grommit" fame. This evolved into a British TV series, which first aired in 2003, which in turned spawned the American version four years later. The premise was both simple and sublime: the producers recorded the unscripted conversations of "real people", which were then rendered into Claymation form with anthropomorphic animals mouthing the words. The laughs grew from the bizarre juxtapositions of the "live" soundtrack and the animated image. A middle-aged couple discussing their material possessions were depicted as a pair of pigs; another couple talking about their sex lives were "reinvented" as porcupines; a woman complaining about her dry skin became a goldfish in a water tank; a lady griping about her experiences at a fitness center was animated as a hippopotamus; a brace of sweethearts reciting the traditional "She loves me, she loves me not" were drawn as a pair of monkey picking insects off one another; and so on. Produced by Aardman Animations, the American edition of Creature Comforts premiered June 4, 2007 on CBS; unfortunately, it was not nearly as successful as its British predecessor, and disappeared after only a handful of episodes. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Eccentric inventor Wallace (voice of Peter Sallis) and his faithful if often perplexed dog Gromit are back in their first feature-length adventure from animator Nick Park. Wallace and Gromit have launched a new business venture just in time for a major gardening competition in their neighborhood of West Wallaby. "Anti-Pesto" is a humane pest-relocation service in which Wallace and Gromit capture rabbits and other critters who have been eating the produce from local gardens and give them new homes somewhere else. Business has been going well, and when the woman hosting the garden show, Lady Tottington (voice of Helena Bonham Carter), discovers a massive tribe of rabbits has been making a mess of her garden, she calls in Wallace and Gromit to move the bunnies elsewhere. Wallace is quite taken with Lady Tottington, but he's not the only one -- Victor Quartermaine (voice of Ralph Fiennes) is a slick but arrogant upper-class type who wants to win Lady Tottington's hand (and fortune) and is convinced he can do a better job capturing the rabbits than Wallace. However, Wallace's attempts to brainwash the rabbits away from veggies using his latest invention has disastrous results, and soon Wallace has to deal with a beastly bunny as well as a heavily-armed Quartermaine. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit followed Park's previous film with the duo, A Close Shave, by ten years, and was produced after Park broke through to mainstream success with the feature Chicken Run. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

Directed by Erez Laufer, Mike Brant -- Laisse moi t'aimer is a documentary based on the real-life death of Mike Brant, who reluctantly became a foreign singing sensation during the 1960s and '70s. Born in a displaced person's camp in Cyprus, the then-named Moshe Brand grew up in a working-class environment, occasionally making time to entertain at weddings, bar mitzvahs, and, eventually, nightclubs both at home and abroad. When Sylvie and Carlos Varton saw one of his performances, they whisked him off to Paris and saw to it that his career took off. Though he was an almost instant success, he is believed to have committed suicide at the age of 28. This film features rare interviews with family, friends, and colleagues, as well as footage from home movies, television appearances, and radio recordings. ~ Tracie Cooper, All Movie Guide

David Sproxton and Peter Lord, founders of the U.K.'s Aardman Animations which created the popular Wallace & Gromit series as well as the big-screen success of Chicken Run, celebrate over 25 years of films starring the lovable claymation character Morph in this three-part series. New computer animation and comic sequences originally made for the BBC television series have been combined to provide a delightfully fun source of entertainment for children ages five and up. ~ Kathryn Tamms, All Movie Guide