British animator Nick Park has three Oscars, two legendary characters in Wallace & Gromit and one big sheepish grin on his face this week.

The grin is being generated by the Toronto Film Festival, where the 46-year-old native of Preston, Lancashire, England, is a legitimate star.

Today, Park is hosting a Mavericks workshop -- open to the ticket-buying public at 5 p.m. at the Isabel Bader Theatre -- under the cozy title, A Model Animator: The Uncanny Artistry of Nick Park.

On Friday, Park presents the premiere of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, his first full-length feature starring hapless inventor Wallace and his silent superdog Gromit. It is a family-friendly Gala that will open commercially in October.

"Yeah!" Park said yesterday about his delight over appearing so prominently at the world's number two filmfest. "For me, it's a dream come true just to be taken seriously, in a sense."

All for a claymation animated film geared to delighted children and adults cool enough to see The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit as an homage to old Universal horror flicks of the 1930s, as well as to other movies ranging from King Kong to Hitchcock classics. "I mean, it's not serious but just to be taken seriously as a movie ...

"That's how we (Park and his co-director Steve Box) approached it. It's not like a cartoon that's become more sophisticated. There is a cartoon quality. But I love live action movies as much as I love cartoons and this is a marriage of the two, in a way."

The characters of Wallace & Gromit, as well as the other people and pets and rascally rabbits in The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, were created in clay and then manipulated on miniature but realistic sets, one tiny step at a time, one frame of film at a time, to create the illusion of movement. That is the process of claymation or stop-frame animation. Digital animation was used in a scant few scenes, only seconds at a time.

According to Park, clay is a marvellous medium to express human emotions, even on Gromit, who uses his eyebrows, gestures and posture to convey subtle meaning. "Yeah, that's exactly it," Park said. "That why I'm so attracted to clay. I never really felt like I made a choice between this and any other medium, whether it's CG (computer generated animation) or whatever.

"Wallace & Gromit were born out of clay. I find it an expressive medium and a very immediate medium as well. It happens in front of the camera, like live action really, but in a slower way because we're tweaking the characters in very tiny increments. And the animator has very direct contact with the clay on every single frame of film, every 24th of a second. You can kind of imbue that character with soul because you're slowly nudging and teasing out the character.

Two of Park's Oscars were earned for Wallace & Gromit shorts: A Close Shave (1996) and The Wrong Trousers (1993). A third, the Wallace & Gromit debut film, A Grand Day Out (1989), earned an Oscar nomination but lost out to Creature Comforts (1989).

Guess who directed Creature Comforts? Nick Park! And now he is being taken seriously at the Toronto filmfest.