Sure, Vinton did a Raisins spot with Michael Jackson, a big fan (and a guy who knew a good fad to latch onto when he saw it). It features clips of decades of behind-the-scenes home movies and TV feature stories - some national, but the vast majority from local media right there in Portland, which emphasize both his hometown loyalty and the pejorative label “small time.” “Claydream” has interviews with collaborators, Vinton Studios alumni, fellow animators like Bill Plympton and animation historian Jerry Beck. Even after he took his studio into CGI - pioneering the talking M&Ms commercials - he lacked the vision, team-building skills and storyeller’s eye that allowed Pixar to revolutionize the medium with “Toy Story.” And the ungainly, atonal “Adventures of Mark Twain” (1985) showed “story,” “script” and characters to not be his strong suits.Īs someone who cultivated a Disney-esque sense of “credit,” he never recruited talented writers to collaborate and share the glory with. The director who mostly had to content himself with shorts and filming other people’s commercials and TV ideas got to make one feature film. He won an a Emmy for a “California Raisins” holiday special, which says more about the Emmys following fads than it does about the work. Vinton popularized “Claymation,” but Aardman (“Wallace & Gromit,” “Chicken Run”) did it better, even if he wouldn’t let them use that term to describe the work. Vinton started plans for a “Frog Prince” movie, but Disney got there first.
Writer-director Marq Evans’ “Claydream” treats this piece of Portlandia lore - Vinton was a native Oregonian who kept his business there and wanted his planned theme park built there - as a tragedy, a Preston Tucker style visionary stymied and stopped just short of glory.īut it’s apparent that even Evans had to see this “character,” as one former colleague says, had more than one “character flaw” that just wouldn’t let it happen. He wanted to create a character that he would own, “that would make an amusement park.” It never happened, and the studio he founded didn’t reach its artistic peak until it was taken from him.
He’d won an Oscar for a short film - “Closed Mondays” - he co-directed in 1974. At his peak, his animation house had two series on the air in 2000.Īs the new documentary “Claydreams” reminds us, Vinton had that “Be the new Walt Disney” dream, and he never let go of it. He invented the term “Claymation,” and copyrighted it, even though it became short-hand for stop-motion Plasticine-animation. Domino’s Pizzas were menaced by his character, The Noid. The clay-animated California Raisins TV commercials made him a household name. For a pretty long stretch from the mid-80s into the very early 2000s, animator Will Vinton‘s work was everywhere.
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