Essence of humanity is a funny ‘Creature’

It’s sometimes the simplest ideas that generate the most complex effects.

“Creature Comforts,” which gets its stateside premiere tonight on BBC America, is a series of shorts based on Nick Park’s 1989 Oscar-winning film, in which Plasticine animals are animated to a soundtrack of unscripted ordinary people -- “the voices of the great British public” -- talking about their lives and the world. Park is, of course, also the creator of “Wallace and Gromit,” and though he is a producer here and not the director, the series has his look and his touch. (Director Richard Goleszowski is the man behind the cult series “Rex the Runt.”)

The original film made a connection between zoos and institutional human housing; subjects in this series (nine half-hour episodes created from more than two-dozen short films) include sex, self-image, neighborhoods and the art of imitation, as seemingly discussed by spiders and slugs and birds and rats and cats and bats and dogs and pigs and foxes and horses. A Christmas special, built around imperfect memories of “The 12 Days of Christmas,” comes along later in the month.

I can’t say that the intention here was anything more than to get a laugh -- though I suspect it was -- but, at the risk of sounding totally pretentious, I can’t think of anything else on TV that so generously, and easily, addresses what more darkly inclined philosophers like to call the Human Condition, or engages such a broad spectrum of society. The voice of Britain is an especially varied one, with its astonishing multiplicity of accents representing place, class and culture; it might be Indian or Jamaican or African, as well. But “Creature Comforts” also employs the voice of children and of the rarely heard-from elderly.

It doesn’t matter how smart the speakers are, or how erudite, or how funny, the animation, which is superbly expressive, takes care of the humor (which is kind, even when it’s penetrating) and drives home their points. All that’s necessary is that they be unselfconsciously themselves, or self-conscious in such a way that the front they put on reveals more than it hides. And it seems true -- though, oddly enough, the editorial inclinations of reality television can make it seem otherwise -- that ordinary people talking often, if not most often, write better dialogue than professional screenwriters. Whereas the cliches that pros promulgate spring either from laziness or lack of imagination or an honest desire to play by supposed rules of dramaturgy, the cliches we use daily ourselves are something else entirely -- the building blocks of culture, what we use to define ourselves even as we struggle against them to become ourselves.

Some of the humor here comes from simple puns -- “a bedroom with a leak in the roof” becomes “a bedroom with a leek in the roof,” its bulb jutting into the underground living room of a family of moles. Some of it is funny for being improbable -- a sublimely inert Shar-Pei, with the voice of a man from India, being asked to impersonate Robert De Niro or Naomi Campbell or Kate Moss. But mostly it works on shifts of context: A woman’s observation that she likes her neighborhood “because of the people,” takes on a new meaning when put in the voice of an alligator living in a sewer. A man talking about the corgi he met and fell in love with becomes something else coming from the mouth of another corgi.

As with all anthropomorphic animated animals, we are meant to think about the animal qualities of humans, rather than the human qualities of animals, though that comes into it as well. But what it really does is focus your hearing. You can close your eyes and just listen -- hear the people speaking as people -- and get the general point, though, obviously, only a fraction of the humor. But what the animation does, somehow, is focus your attention. It lets you hear better, even if it’s just a dog in a Santa cap exulting that, “Life is just so exciting and so enjoyable -- life’s just fantastic.”

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‘Creature Comforts’

Where: BBC America

When: 8 tonight

Ratings: Unrated

Creator...Nick Park

Executive producer: Nick Park. Director: Richard Goleszowski.