Claydream
Marq Evans’s documentary proves to be an intriguing portrait of the life and work of the animator Will Vinton, covering both his success and failure.
Such has been the success of Britain's Aardman Animations that audiences around the world immediately think of the work of Nick Park and his colleagues whenever mention is made of clay-based stop motion animation. In America, however, that medium is just as likely to bring to mind the work of Will Vinton who had his own studio in Portland, Oregon. Ironically, his fame in the USA hit its peak through a series of quite exceptionally popular TV commercials made for the California Raisin Advisory Board, although his aims were far more ambitious and he had earlier won an Oscar for a short animated film, Closed Mondays, which he had made with Bob Gardiner.
Claydream, a film by Marq Evans, is a documentary which sets out to tell Vinton’s story, one that is certainly fascinating given its many ups and downs and its elements of controversy. In his film’s rather scrappy opening scenes, Evans chooses to include footage of deposition hearings from 2003 when Vinton sued the CEO of Nike, Phil Knight, claiming that the latter, who had become a director of Vinton Studios, had forced him out unfairly. This legal battle which Vinton would lose becomes a running thread in Claydream since Evans returns to it at intervals. Another major controversy arose due to the fact that soon after completing their joint work on Closed Mondays, Vinton and Gardiner split up leaving Gardiner, who was apparently bipolar, believing that he had been sidelined. Far from being fleeting, this attitude became an obsession leading to a threat to assassinate Vinton in 1989.
Although Vinton died in 2018, there is so much footage of him available from interviews and from occasional home movies that Claydream is virtually Vinton’s story told by the man himself despite the inclusion of contributions by family, friends, and colleagues. He himself always put on an optimistic facade and may not be an altogether reliable narrator. Certainly the film raises questions without necessarily supplying answers. He emerges as an ambitious man, doubtless a workaholic, who wanted to be another Walt Disney albeit rejecting Hollywood in favour of having his own studio in Portland. But what starts out sympathetically as a straightforward success story – his interest in film and architecture at Berkeley in the counterculture days of the 1960s leading to that Oscar win at the age of 26 and his subsequent development of clay animation in short films over the next six or seven years – suddenly takes on a different tone. Although he seems to have become a better father in his last years, he appears to have neglected his children when they were young and to have walked out on his second wife, Susan Shadburne, in an echo of how his first marriage had ended. Furthermore, he became disliked by many of the animators who worked for him earlier on as he increasingly took to wanting all the credit himself and later on he became noted for overworking his staff.
The film quite reasonably opts to be more of a biography than a study of animation techniques but we do see extracts from his work and realise that Vinton’s acclaim for commercials was not what he had hoped for – indeed that followed the critical flop of his key five-year enterprise, a feature-length Claymation film entitled The Adventures of Mark Twain. The success of the California Raisins led to TV shows and to video work with Michael Jackson among others and for a while things went well enough for him to plan his own amusement park, Claymation Station, in an echo of Disneyland. But decidedly bad times would follow even if Vinton did experiment with new techniques and had some successes as well as failures – all of which would lead to the legal conflict with Phil Knight and to the Vinton Studio being transformed into Laika Animation with both Knight and his son, the animator Travis Knight, as its key figures.
Claydream leaves one with the impression that it somewhat skirts around the complexity of Will Vinton both in his personal life and when it comes to showing what sort of a person he was as a studio head. Nevertheless, while the film could have dug deeper, one does get an interesting impression of a man who, although seeking to maintain a facade in public, was a filmmaker whose successes were never quite of the kind that he yearned for as an artist.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Featuring Susan Shadburne, Jesse Vinton, Bill Plympton, Michele M. Mariana, Melissa Mitchell, Craig Bartlett, Jerry Beck, Chris Ohlgren, Mary McDonald-Lewis, and archive footage of Will Vinton.
Dir Marq Evans, Pro Tamir Ardon, Marq Evans, Kevin Moyer and Nick Spicer, Screenplay Marq Evans, Ph Jason Roark, Ed Lucas Celler and Yakima, Music Heather McIntosh.
XYZ Films/Starburns Industries/The McCaw/One Two Twenty Films-Altitude Film Entertainment. Available on Altitude.film and on other digital platforms.
96 mins. USA. 2021. US Rel: 5 August 2022. UK Rel: 21 November 2022. Cert. 12.
