Thursday, October 4, 2018

RIP Will Vinton (1947-2018)


It has been a few months since I last posted, when Dear Basketball won the Oscar. It's now been a week since Cartoon Brew posted a list of the animated short films that have qualified via either public exhibition, festival awards, or Student Academy Awards, but it was not a definitive list, and much of the films that were featured are still only trailers. So I decided not to make a separate post when it wouldn't be much different than what Amid Amidi had already done. Instead, I will take this time to report on another major news event: the death of a previous winner of this category, the legendary stop motion animator Will Vinton, who died earlier today of complications from multiple myeloma.

Will Vinton is perhaps best known today as forming the animation studio that was responsible for creating the California Raisins and the M&M mascots. (Well, maybe people don't know he was responsible for those, but his studio was.) Twenty years before that he was fresh out of college and an aspiring filmmaker and teamed up with a college buddy Bob Gardiner to make an eight-minute stop motion short film of an inebriated man walking through an art museum and watching the art come to life. The film featured realistic facial expressions and had a psychedelic vibe. It was a hit, and ended up winning Vinton and Gardiner the Oscar for Best Animated Short for 1974, a highly competitive year.



Vinton and Gardiner went their separate ways, and Vinton continued to develop his style of stop motion animation with clay, a style that came to be known as "claymation," a term which he eventually trademarked. There have been other animated projects using clay including Gumby and the Oscar nominated Clay or the Origin of Species, but Vinton quickly became the most notable practitioner. He formed his own studio and created a series of 30-minute adaptations of famous folklores, including Rip Van Winkle which had gotten Vinton another Oscar nomination. Vinton was nominated two more times in the Best Animated Short category for The Creation, which featured the 2D paint style of Joan C. Gratz (who would win an Oscar herself in 1992 for Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase) and The Great Cognito.

Besides his short films, Will Vinton Studios also worked on commercial projects, partially to help fund his more ambitious films. In the mid-1980s he was hired to make a commercial for the California Raisin Advisory Board of a group of claymation singing raisins. The California Raisins eventually became a culture phenomenon and had numerous commercials and even their own Saturday morning cartoons. They also helped create the character of Noid for Domino's commercials, and in 1995 came up with their most endearing work: "spokescandies" for the M&M candies.

Alas, animation is an expensive and labor intensive industry, and many animation studios go under behind the scenes. The same happened to Will Vinton Studios. The success of the M&M ad campaign and the contract to produce the animation for Eddie Murphy's claymation short The PJ's led to a need for rapid expansion, and they found a big one in Phil Knight, the billionaire chairman of Nike. Alas, the PJ's was short-lived, and poor financial planning led to further financial distress. Knight ended up taking ownership and buying out Will Vinton, who was left with nothing but a severance package and his wicked mustache. Will Vinton Studios was soon rebranded as "Laika" and moved away from claymation to more traditional stop motion fare, including Coralina and Kubo and the Two Strings. Vinton went on to create another independent studio, but then contracted multiple myeloma. He fought the disease valiantly, but he succumbed to the illness at age 70. He leaves behind a legacy of being a stop motion visionary as well as a great filmmaker. And for that he should be celebrated.

Here are some other Will Vinton films, both Oscar nominated and not











And I suppose I might as well list the films on the qualifying list that has complete versions online
Annihilation
Back to the Moon
Bao
Fire in Cardboard City
Glucose
Lotus Lantern
One Small Step
Raccoon and the Light
Re-Gifted
Shahkboy
Skin for Skin
The Noise of Licking (A Nyalintas Nesze)

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