IN THE WANING YEARS of the ’80s, one of the biggest (and most surprising) pop culture phenomena was stop-motion clay animation, or “claymation.” Dinosaurs, singing California raisins, and a weirdly popular pizza mascot called the Noid—all made of clay—dominated the cultural landscape. Michael Jackson provided the voice for one of the singing clay raisins. A segment on the popular show Moonlighting (ask your parents) was produced in claymation, and the airwaves saw multiple TV specials entirely animated in clay. A thriving merchandising industry—T-shirts, toys, coffee mugs, and more—was built around weird characters made out of brightly colored sculpting dirt. Claymation was everywhere.
The man at the helm of it all was Portland’s Will Vinton, the eponymous head of Will Vinton Studios, which for years turned out some of the most popular and distinctive animation around. That is, until the early 2000s, when it was taken over by the head of another powerful local company. Today Will Vinton’s legacy lives on, and he sat down with the Mercury to reminisce about his time as Portland’s premier animator.
A Life Born in Clay
Vinton (who, with his shaved head and handlebar mustache, resembles a carnival strongman) got his start in the UC Berkeley counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. However, his early education in architecture soon turned into an animation obsession.
“I started designing in plasticine clay,” Vinton says, “because I really liked the organic shapes of architects like Antoni Gaudí. I figured the only way to design that way was to sculpt. So my artist pals and I would sit around on Friday evenings with a wad of clay, and shoot stop-motion animation.”
Along with Gaudí, Vinton also cites a 1965 short film called Clay or the Origin of Species as an early influence. Just under nine minutes long, the black-and-white film features lumps of clay, shaped roughly like dinosaurs, eating each other while a jazz soundtrack plays. It’s elemental, plotless, and has little in the way of, say, editing. Nevertheless, it inspired Vinton, who wanted to make a movie that would bring established filmmaking methods to clay animation.
“I was already pretty proficient as a live-action filmmaker,” he says. “So it was just a matter of incorporating traditional cinematic techniques, and applying them to these experimental films. I wanted to show that you could rack focus [change the focus of the lens within a shot] between the character and a painting, that kind of thing. So we made a laundry list, and that became our script.”
Switching between close-ups and wider shots involved making two different models of the main character. The body model (for wider shots) was about a foot high, while the face for close-ups was life-size.
“We got a plastic skull from OMSI and set it on an armature [the framework around which a structure is built], and put some prosthetic eyes in there,” says Vinton. Vinton covered the skull with clay, and soon had a character who was ready for his close-up.
