Miami-mation
Forced to Grow Up, the Craft Goes Digital — and Its Father Gets a Little Tongue-in-Cheek

“I liked Miami as sort of an exotic international themed place. It has a kind of wonder — a mixture of colorful tropical allure and danger.”

The artist/filmmaker/author/lecturer at work.

By Angie Hargot

The number is dialed at precisely 12:30 p.m. as the PR person instructed. Happily, Will Vinton answers: “This is Will.” After a quick introduction, Vinton says abruptly, “Can you call back in a few minutes? I’m just finishing up something.” It’s 9:30 a.m. where Vinton is, in Oregon.

It’s understandable, Vinton is a busy guy. But after an exchange like that you can’t help but imagine the man with a jeweler’s loupe, slumped over a clay sculpture of a foot-tall raisin with arms, legs and a face. Of course, his day is probably nothing like that anymore. According to him, he’s more likely to be working with a mouse than a raisin.

Vinton is widely known as the “father of claymation.” It’s a form of stop-motion animation painstakingly created by meticulously sculpting figures from clay, filming a frame, moving them slightly, and then filming another frame. Once played in succession, the human eye perceives the movement as motion. Think that famous frame-by-frame filmstrip of a running horse. Or those flip books you had as a kid.

Friday is the last day you have to see Will Vinton’s personal claymation and animation collection at Miami International University of Art & Design.

While Vinton didn’t invent claymation — it actually dates back to the days of silent film (and remember Gumby?) — he’s been called the “Walt Disney of the craft” for completely revolutionizing the technique and transforming it into an art form.

The word “claymation” itself is actually a bit of jabberwocky. Well, technically, it’s a portmanteau, and Vinton has it trademarked. Literally.

Born in McMinnville, Oregon, in 1947, Vinton by the ’60s was making independent documentary films on other creative rabblerousers at college in Berkeley. Back home in Portland, he began collaborating with another clay animation pioneer from his college days, Bob Gardiner. The film they produced, Closed Mondays, follows a drunk as he stumbles around an art gallery. In that film Vinton and crew innovated a technique of using real actors to create a “reference film” that allowed the resulting claymation creations to express emotion and facial features previously unseen in animation. The film won an Oscar in 1975.

The Vinton-Gardiner team split during the production of its second film a year later. But Vinton went on to build what became the constantly growing Will Vinton Studios, and most recently, Freewill Entertainment.

As his studio developed, so did Vinton’s film list and awards. Emmys, Clios, you name it. His recognizable creations grew into household phenomenons. You remember the California Raisins? That was Vinton. The claymation M&M’s? Vinton. The TV series The PJ’s? The Noid that terrorized hungry Domino’s customers? Vinton too. (What was that thing, an evil pizza-pilfering bunny-eared man? Pretty much.)

In 1989 an Atlanta man, Kenneth Lamar Noid, believing the “Noid” character to be based on him, held two local Domino’s employees hostage for about six hours, during which time they were forced to make him pizza. After demands for $100,000, a helicopter in which to make his escape and a copy of the Illuminatus’ The Widow’s Son, Noid’s hostages escaped, according to various newspaper reports, and he surrendered. He was eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity, and many a local paper had fun running a “Noid Avoids Jail Time …” (or similar) headline.

And a recent story by the Fort Worth/Dallas Star-Telegram staff writer Heather Svokos about the Six Flags mascot (although hardly a reliable scientific meter) rated the Noid as “surging” on an invented scale of advertising icons’ creepiness. Goes to show how Vinton’s work spans the ages.

(Vinton didn’t design the Noid, mind you. He just claymated it.)

And Vinton has since moved on to bigger and better things. His latest movie, a live action/CG animation flick called The Morning After, claimed a 2005 award at the Worldfest Independent Film Awards in Houston.

According to Vinton, claymation might have creeped a few people out, but we’re lucky for it — it was the precursor to modern animation.

“Claymation right now has given way to computer animation tools,” Vinton said. “If I were to create a movie, 60 percent of it would be computer animated. Claymation opened the way to 3D animation in general. There was a time when we produced 3D animation using it. We pioneered 3D animation by doing claymation. Movies I’m working on now tend to use tools rather than regular stop-motion animation.”

True, you don’t see very much claymation anymore, save for some of the creepy-style work of Tim Burton. “He has continued to use stop-motion in movies like Corpse Bride because he likes the look of it. But these days there’s CG [computer graphics] in there,” Vinton said.

The artist was in town recently for the Miami International University’s opening of his exhibition I Heard It Through the Grapevine – The Art of Animation, and delivering a handful of lectures on animation and filmmaking to local students.

“It was fun being down there and it happened to coincide with the Jack Hightower release, which is set in Miami. It was pretty great — the shows I did in conjunction went very well. Packed audiences, students mostly,” Vinton said.

His first graphic novel, Jack Hightower, co-written with Andrew Wiese, while not exactly ground-breaking as far as graphic novels go, represents a decided shift in the artist’s concentration.

Splashed across the cover of Jack Hightower is a ’50s-era dame with some seriously illustrated gams. Hightower is “the agency’s most lethal ten inches — unleashed.” The plot begins with a busty nurse showing Hightower a make-up compact (sexier than any hospital-issued mirror) while informing him of his new condition. Some kind of fantastic altercation with a villain named Dr. Flagitious Savant and a “shrink ray” has left him in relatively good health, except for the unfortunate side effect that he’s now the size of a toy action hero — about 10 inches tall. “What changed? Jack’s still 10 inches of pure man!” according to Hightower’s ex-girlfriend.

The novel follows the typical Miami-plot road of supermodels and excess, media frenzies, covert maneuvering and Bond-ish operative types.

“I liked Miami as sort of an exotic international themed place. It has a kind of wonder —a mixture of colorful, tropical allure and danger. It’s a colorful place to set the novel.”

There’s already an action figure in the works (which Vinton calls “life-sized”) and the author has big plans for the little guy.

“There may be other projects with the same character, Jack Hightower,” Vinton said. “I hope to turn it into a movie,” but right now Vinton is busy appearing at animation festivals, conventions and book signings across the country.

Vinton’s work is on view through Friday at Miami International University of Art & Design Gallery, 1501 Biscayne Blvd., Miami. Admission is free. Call 305-428-5700.

Comments? E-mail angie@miamisunpost.com.