Creature Comforts America - The Complete Season One DVD Review

Aardman Animation is probably best known for Chicken Run and the Wallace and Gromit clay-animation cartoons, including the Academy Award winning feature film, Wallace & Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit, but they also produced an extremely creative television show in the UK called Creature Comforts. This show took the interviews of ordinary citizens, creating an animal claymation character to house the voice of each person. The animals are creatively chosen from what the person says in the interview, with people speaking of flying represented as birds and so forth, and it is in the creative choices for animals that the interviews truly come alive and become humorous. The common man is often disturbing, strange, mesmerizing and unpredictable, but Creature Comforts would not work as interviews alone. The characters became such a success that they have lived on in commercials and now a new show with all new characters. It is the added creativity of animals and animation that made the show great and it is almost as horrifying as it is gratifying to have Creature Comforts turn their attention to America.

Unscripted interviews are bound to be unintelligible and humorous most often, especially when people are with their family or friends and told that they are being recorded. This is why you get men asking questions like, “Why can’t words ever be right” while they are recorded. These humorous statements are the reasons we should never record ourselves speaking and why Creature Comforts is remarkably entertaining. A collection of American public in itself is a frightening notion, knowing that the collection is bound to be from the more eclectic areas to ensure quirky character. Fortunately it is never the filmmaker’s intentions to make anyone look bad and it is all in good fun. This is made apparent by the way that certain interviews are skewed to fit animals even though it is obvious that the interviewees were oblivious to that fact. For instance, an elderly man in a retirement home is asked about his living conditions and this answer is placed on a lion in a zoo when asked his opinion on zoo captivity. It is wonderfully creative and all in good fun, seemingly unable to be mean-spirited in the least, despite the ease in which this could slip when placing people’s voices on animals.

Each thirty-minute episode is given a few topics for the interviews. There are seven episodes on disc one of the two disc set with special features all reserved for the second disc. There are deleted and alternate scenes, some of which have different animation and the other type has additional interview material. There are also live action comparisons with crew members mouthing the dialogue alongside the claymation versions. The only other feature clumps certain interviews of favorite characters together.