Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park has said making his first BBC Christmas special starring the two Plasticine characters for 13 years felt like a "homecoming" after the pressure of shooting Hollywood feature films.

Park has made the new Wallace and Gromit 30-minute film A Matter of Loaf and Death for BBC1, after making two feature films, Chicken Run and The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.

He revealed at a screening for the BBC Christmas special today that the original title for the new Wallace and Gromit adventure – Trouble at t'Mill – had to be changed so that it translated more easily for the international market.

"I felt I wanted to get my ideas out quicker and the 30-minute format is more humane. The first film took seven years to film and this one took seven months," he said.

When the BBC announced the new Wallace and Gromit project last year, Park commented: "It's nice to be out of that feature film pressure now. I don't feel like I'm making a film for a kid in some suburb of America – and being told they're not going to understand a joke, or a northern saying. I'm making this for myself again and the people who love Wallace and Gromit."

Park made his last half-hour Wallace and Gromit TV animation, A Close Shave, for the BBC2 Christmas schedule in 1995. He described the latest film as a "homecoming" to the BBC.

The hugely popular animated stories are painstakingly made by hand with tiny Plasticine models of the characters and with a team of 14 animators working around the clock on separate sets.

Park added that a day's filming produces between one-and-a-half and three seconds of footage and that he is forced "to run between each set like a headless chicken".

And while filming time for the latest 30-minute film was only seven months, the time between the idea's conception to the finished product was still long – about 20 months, according to Park.

The plot of A Matter of Loaf and Death is familiar territory for fans of the absent-minded, cheese loving inventor and his canny pooch, who now find themselves the proprietors of a bakery at their home, Top Bun.

Wallace falls in love with Piella Bakewell, a physically imposing former bread commercial star, much to the consternation of Gromit. But the clever canine soon discovers that she may have something to do with a spate of murders of bakers.

Explaining the enduring appeal of his characters, who were first seen in A Grand Day Out, broadcast on Channel 4 on Christmas Eve 1990, Park said that "Gromit is a silent character who loves order in his world. Wallace is a source of chaos."

Park followed up A Grand Day Out with 1993's The Wrong Trousers and then A Close Shave two years later, both for BBC TV, before turning his hand to feature films with Chicken Run, which featured voices by stars including Mel Gibson.

In 2005 Wallace and Gromit made it to the big screen in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, while Park was also involved in spin-off BBC children's series, Shaun the Sheep.

The Curse of the Were-Rabbit won an Oscar for best animated feature in 2006 and the global popularity of the film was one reason why the original title of the latest film, Trouble at 't Mill, was discarded because the phrase would not be immediately familiar to the show's fans outside the UK.

Park said that he is now taking time off to "give my brain a rest". However, he is currently mulling over new movie ideas.

Aardman, the Bristol-based independent production company through which Park works, is also about to begin work on a feature film called Pirates.

A Matter of Loaf and Death was today described as "witty, charming and life affirming" by the BBC1 controller, Jay Hunt.

The show is part of a BBC1 Christmas lineup including the Doctor Who Christmas special and a remake of the Hitchcock classic The Thirty Nine Steps starring former Spooks star Rupert Penry-Jones.

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