After five long but very rewarding years, Oscar-winning director Nick Park's dream of taking his quintessentially British animated heroes Wallace and Gromit to the big screen, thus joining the greats of Hollywood, has finally become a reality.

The cheese-loving duo are now appearing in their first ever full-length movie, thanks to the genius of their creator Nick Park, and the financial muscle of Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks Studios, which invested $30 million making Park's dream come true.

Wallace, an eccentric inventor, and his loyal canine companion Gromit, first came to be just over 16 years ago when a young British animation student named Nick Park dreamt up the pair while studying at the National Film and Television School in England.

Nick Park: creator of Pleistocene comedy duo Wallace & Gromit

Park's first Wallace and Gromit short was named "A Grand Day Out"; although only 30 minutes in length, it took six years to create. This of course was due to the painstaking attention to detail and stop-motion animation that has now become so synonymous with Park.

During its creation, Park contacted Peter Lord and David Sproxton, partners in a British firm named Aardman Animations. So impressed were they with Park's work that they joined forces and the rest, as they say, is history.

In 1990, "A Grand Day Out" was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short but was beaten by another Park creation, "Creature Comforts". The latter took the Oscar that time, but in 1994 Park collected his second Oscar for "The Wrong Trousers", the second Wallace and Gromit short. And two years later, "A Close Shave" - the duo's third outing - saw Park return to collect another Oscar.

With each new adventure, Wallace and Gromit increase their global fan base. The shorts have now been seen in more than 46 countries, and now - after five years in the making - the pair are headlining their first feature-length movie, entitled "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit".

Promotional poster for 'Curse of the Were-Rabbit'

"It's really a dream come true," said director, writer and producer Nick Park. "Wallace & Gromit were my college creations, and it is quite something to think they are starring in their first full-length feature film."

Aardman Animations and American-based studio DreamWorks previously collaborated on "Chicken Run", Aardman's first full-length feature. And to create the new movie, Nick Park worked with co-director Steve Box, who had also worked on earlier shorts, and as an animator on 'Chicken Run'.

"Making a 30-minute Wallace & Gromit movie is time consuming and requires a lot of patience and care," said Box. "Making an 85-minute feature is like making the Great Wall of China with matchsticks. It's a monumental feat, actually. It was five years of solid work, because every tiny, little thing matters so much. But I think the biggest challenge of taking these characters from 30 minutes to 85 minutes was finding the story."

Park recalls, "It took a while to come up with an idea we felt was expansive enough to suggest a full-length movie. Steve and I sat for hours on end with other writers, and we suddenly hit on this idea about a Were-Rabbit. You know, the Wallace & Gromit movies have always referenced other film genres, and we thought a great genre to borrow from would be the Universal Classic horror movies.

"In our movie, however, instead of a werewolf, we would have a Were-Rabbit, and instead of devouring flesh and blood, in Wallace & Gromit's world, it had to be something more absurd - so we made it vegetables. In effect, 'The Curse of the Were-Rabbit' became the world's first vegetarian horror movie."

A model designer sets up Wallace's Anti-Pesto car