Michael Cusack, quite simply, is the most gifted, warm, generous, talented and humble person on the planet.

Starting life, like so many before him as a foetus with no particular skills other than the ability to breathe underwater, he has gone on to become a multi award winning animator. Not bad for someone who spent a full nine months simply wasting time floating around in amniotic fluid.

As a child, he had a rather unnatural attraction to monsters of all types and can still remember blubbering as King Kong plummeted from the top of the Empire State building (the rubber one, not the collection of coloured pixels) or being enthralled as Jason fought a bunch of stop motion skeletal warriors. From the moment he first saw those films, he knew that he was destined to be a teacher.

Teaching turned out to be crap because there were too many children involved, so from there he stumbled into the wonderful world of animation ...