''I'm a big wildlife fanatic myself,'' Park says, sounding just a wee bit like his most famous human creation, crackers and cheese-loving inventor Wallace. ''I love bird watching, whale watching, that kind of thing. Nature is one of my big interests.'' In person, Park seems hopelessly shy. He's the type of person who can spend countless hours tweaking small Plasticine models, but when it comes to interacting with another flesh-and-blood human, doesn't quite know where to rest his eyes or what to do with his hands. Park's modesty is part of his charm, and it certainly comes across in his work.

For those not already in the know, Wallace and Gromit are the endearing dog-and-master duo who brought Aardman Animation studios to the world's attention. In Park's words, "Wallace is a daffy inventor, 50-something bachelor, quite eccentric, who goes off on mad schemes often without much thought. Gromit is his much more cautious sidekick of a dog. He's much more intelligent and often has to be quite heroic in getting Wallace out of his self-made scrapes.''

Though Gromit never says a word, he's ultimately the main character. The pair has already starred in three half-hour claymation adventures, the result of a painstaking stop-motion process in which each animator captures roughly three seconds of footage a day. At 85 minutes, just imagine the work that went into Aardman's first feature-length outing.

Park describes Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit as ''the world's first vegetarian horror movie,'' since the fearsome creature of the film's title attacks only vegetables. Homage is a key element of Park's style (with nods to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells in A Grand Day Out and Alfred Hitchcock in The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave), and his latest is no exception.

''We were exploring what area hadn't we gone with Wallace and Gromit in terms of movie references, and suddenly it was very apparent that we should try the Universal horror pictures of the 1930s,'' he says. "At the same time, we were thinking about bunnies stealing vegetables in Wallace and Gromit's garden, and the two just kind of came together. It was like a very obvious eureka moment.''

In the new movie, Wallace operates a humane rabbit-riddance service called ''Anti-Pesto,'' vigilantly keeping watch over the town's prize produce. For Wallace, there's always been a fine line between carefree inventor and mad scientist, and when one of his contraptions goes bonkers, he unwittingly unleashes a beast on his terrified neighbors.

The beauty of a ''were-rabbit'' is that the more intense the carnage gets, the funnier the film becomes, since only vegetables are at stake. This isn't the first of Park's films to take a playfully animal-conscious, meat-is-murder stance. Before Curse, Park directed Chicken Run, a prison-break fantasy patterned after The Great Escape in which he makes a compelling case against pot pies on behalf of poultry everywhere.

Growing up, "my sister had a pet chicken," Park confesses. "I just loved to observe it and watch what it does, the kind of character it has, the way it gets itself into funny situations and interacts with its other fellow chickens." Park has extended his keen intuition about the secret nature of seemingly innocuous animals to the unlikeliest of creatures, imagining a world in which resourceful hens, cold-blooded penguins, oblivious sheep, and impressionable young rabbits seem right at home.

His humans, meanwhile, are knobby, likeably misshapen types with big teeth and funny noses. There's no one traditionally handsome in the world of Wallace and Gromit, and that's no accident. "I try to avoid that like the plague," Park laughs. "I like everything to have a distinctive look." On Curse, Park worked with a team of 250 artists to bring his vision to life. Look carefully, and you'll see that his fingerprints are literally all over this movie.

[as featured in The Miami Herald]