Creature Comforts is a British stop-motion comedy franchise originating in a 1989 animated short film of the same name.

[2] The original Creature Comforts (short film) was five minutes and a few seconds long and was conceived and directed by Nick Park and produced by Aardman Animations, featuring the voices of British non-actors in the same vein as the "man on the street" Vox Pop interviews.

These include a family of polar bears, Tracey, a depressed female gorilla, a Brazilian puma, a maternal brown four-eyed opossum, and a hippopotamus calf who complain about the cold weather, the poor quality of their enclosures and the lack of space and freedom.

By contrast, a tarsier, Alex, a former circus chicken, a tortoise, and an armadillo praise their enclosures for the comfort and security they bring, and a family of polar bears, particularly one named Andrew, talk about both the advantages and disadvantages of zoos for the welfare of animals.

The creative team of advertising agency GGK had seen the original Creature Comforts film and were hugely impressed by it.

The initial result of their collaboration was three thirty-seconds Creature Comforts advertisements, made in the same style as the original film.

The series featured a variety of endearing plasticine animals, including a tortoise, a cat, a family of penguins and a Brazilian parrot.

The characters' dialogue was obtained by taking tape recordings of everyday people talking about the comfort and benefits of the electrical appliances in their homes and then using extracts of these – complete with pauses, false starts, repetitions, hesitations and unscripted[citation needed] use of language (such as "easily turn off and on able").

There was a certain charm about the animations, with their quirky humour and sharpness of observation – such as in the antics of the non-speaking characters and in the odd little things happening in the background.

The animations had an unusual expressiveness, with the wit often coming from tiny nuances – such as a dog scratching his ear at a particular moment.

In fact, Creature Comforts was subsequently voted by media professionals (in leading trade outlets Marketing and Brand Republic) as one of the top television advertisements of the last fifty years.

[5] As well as attaining a very high level of viewer recall, the advertisements were much loved – particularly the ones involving Frank (the tortoise), Carol (the cat) and Pablo (the parrot).

[8] Finally, in a YouGov survey during 2006, Creature Comforts topped the list of the United Kingdom's alltime favourite animated or puppet characters used in adverts.

[9] The Creature Comforts advertisements have now attained a place in popular culture, and are probably better remembered than the original film that spawned them.

[10] However, it is claimed that many members of the public mistakenly remember the commercials as advertising gas heating, the main competitor to electricity.

[citation needed] In 2003, a series of Creature Comforts films directed by Richard Goleszowski was made for the British television network ITV by Aardman Animations.

A standard DVD of the show's seven episodes was released on 9 October 2007 by Sony, now entitled Creature Comforts America.