'Claydream' Review: Trials and Transformations
Describing the subject of the documentary Claydream sounds like the set-up for a riddle. What do California raisins, Mark Twain, the M&M mascots, and Nike all have in common? The answer is the pioneering stop-motion animator Will Vinton who passed away from multiple myeloma in 2018. Vinton is credited with developing a particularly sophisticated style of stop-motion that he dubbed “claymation”. In Vinton’s hands, characters and landscapes dreamily flow and transform. The effect is sometimes beautiful, sometimes unsettling, and often both at the same time.
Director Marq Evans is less interested in the technique than in the man. Luckily, Vinton himself was something of a documentarian, providing Evans with a wealth of footage to draw from. In fact, if you want to know more about claymation as a film-making technique, Vinton created a short documentary in 1978 which is included on the Blu-ray release of Claydream along with all of Vinton’s early short films. I highly recommend watching them after the documentary, but even if you don’t, they are generously sampled over the course of the film.
Vinton and collaborator Bob Gardiner won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1975. Closed Mondays was his first completed animation project, and the early success fed something within him that was not quite a demon, but not entirely benevolent either. The fact that he made his documentary about claymation only three years later, with a clay avatar of himself wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt tells the viewer much of what they need to know about Vinton’s aspirations and his own opinion of what he had accomplished. Vinton idolized Disney, another brilliant and flawed creative genius, and even planned to build his own theme park at the height of his career.
Evans doesn’t shy away from exposing Vinton’s lifelong habit of thinking a little too highly of himself and therefore not planning for the possibility of failure. There is visible tension in the interview footage of Vinton and his associates. Evans convincingly shows how the artist struggled to reconcile feeding his creative needs with making a profit, and how he sometimes left personal wreckage in the wake of this struggle. While many clearly loved and admired him, the shadows of his shortcomings linger in the corners. However, the point of Claydream is not to tear down the artist for his faults, only to show a complete picture of a complicated person.
Anyone who was watching TV in the 1980s will have seen Vinton’s talent on display. He skyrocketed to fame with his commercial work after creating the singing California Raisins, followed by the baffling Domino’s mascot “The Noid.” Suddenly, Will Vinton Studios and their clay creations were everywhere. When I was a kid, we had a worn out VHS recording of Will Vinton’s claymation Christmas special and I can still recall the beautiful “clay painting” in the Joy to the World segment and the weird camels singing a jazzy rendition of We Three Kings.
Vinton persevered well into the early 2000s, pitching television shows like The PJs and Gary and Mike. For all of Vinton’s talent in transforming himself to incorporate new technologies and seek out new avenues for his work, he was a poor contract negotiator. After receiving a huge amount of financial backing from Nike founder Phil Knight, he was eventually ousted from his own company just before the studio closed the deal for Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride. Will Vinton’s legacy lives on in LAIKA Studios and its CEO Travis Knight, the son of Phil Knight, and a former animation intern at Will Vinton Studios. The whole saga, as presented by Evans, is as riveting as any fictionalized drama.
Many have argued that the value of art is that it gives us an opportunity to learn about each other. In doing so, we may learn a little more about ourselves. Even if you have no interest in animation, Claydream is an excellent study of the relationship between a creator and his work.
Bonus Mini-Review
The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985)- This film was meant to be Will Vinton Studio’s grand entry into American movie theaters. Unfortunately, marketers and audiences couldn’t fathom an animated movie that wasn’t for kids, but also wasn’t explicitly adult. The movie bombed at the box office and it took many years for Vinton to crawl out of his cratered hopes for making feature length films.
I saw Mark Twain as a child and was, quite frankly, a little scared of it. As an adult, I find it to be a moving portrait of a disillusioned man who can’t quite let go of his last glimmer of hope for humanity. It has all the hallmarks of a passion project, and it was unfortunately far too early in Vinton’s career to be making a passion project. After watching Claydream, it’s clear that Vinton felt drawn to fables, folktales, and classic stories. Mark Twain was nothing if not America’s favorite storyteller.
For Mark Twain super-fans this movie is a delight, stuffed to the rafters with quotes and Easter eggs. It’s also a showcase for all the claymation techniques Will Vinton Studios had perfected at the time. Several of Twain’s short stories are strung together inside a frame narrative that involves Twain taking flight in a hot-air balloon to meet Halley’s Comet. Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Becky Thatcher have stowed away on board only to be quickly discovered. Twain believes the celestial phenomenon foretells his death. Indeed, the real Mark Twain was born just after Halley’s comet appeared in 1835 and died of a heart attack one day after its appearance in 1910.
The film is not without its faults. The adaptation of Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven is boring and pointless, except to poke fun at the stuffy harp and robe rendition of a typical Christian heaven. Additionally, for all of his relative progressiveness, Mark Twain held very bigoted views towards Native Americans, and the 1980s were not exactly enlightened either. A brief appearance of Tom Sawyer’s “Injun Joe” is a startling reminder of this.
On the other hand, Twain’s bittersweet version of the Adam and Eve story and the purposefully disturbing adaptation of The Chronicles of Young Satan (here renamed “The Mysterious Stranger”) are a revelation. If you ever wondered how much of himself Twain poured into his writings, the answer is “a lot.” In that way, Twain and Vinton are alike. Sometimes their art revealed more about themselves than they were willing to admit.
The entire film is available on several free streaming services as well as DVD. While I encourage everyone to see it in its entirety, if you want to watch just the Mysterious Stranger segment, arguably Will Vinton’s most infamous work, it’s available here: