Vinton, award-winning Claymation pioneer, dies at 70

For Will Vinton, everything started with a lump of clay.

During the 1960s, he was an architecture student at the University of California, Berkeley when he became fascinated by the whimsical, organic work of Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi. He needed to use the clay to imitate Gaudi’s sensuous shapes.

His friends, often after a few beers, would play with the clay that was always lying around Vinton’s house. And Vinton would shoot movies of the clay’s evolving form. Those were the seeds of what would become his signature technique, Claymation.

Vinton, the awardwinning animator, died Thursday in Portland, Oregon, after a 12-year battle with multiple myeloma. He was 70.

Colleagues remembered Vinton, a McMinnville, Oregon, native, as a kind, creative person.

“I’ll always have great memories of Will Vinton’s films,” director Peyton Reed said on Twitter. “Hugely inspiring.”

Over his career, he won an Oscar as well as a number of Emmy Awards.

Among his best-known works were the anthropomorphic California Raisins, who wore colorful sneakers and white gloves as they danced along to a soulful voice crooning about being raised in the California sunshine. They won the hearts of television viewers in the 1980s.

Vinton and artist Bob Gardiner experimented with clay animation for five years after graduation from UC Berkley before producing the short film “Closed Mondays.” The film won the Academy Award for animated short in 1975.

Though Vinton was not the first person to animate clay, his film “demonstrated a new and highly sophisticated technique of clay animation incorporating lip-sync dialogue and subtle nuances of facial expression,” wrote Charles Solomon for the Los Angeles Times in 1980.

Vinton received Oscar nominations for the short films “Rip Van Winkle” (1978), “The Creation” (1981) and “The Great Cognito” (1982), as well as one in the visual effects category for “Return of Oz” in 1985.

His studio animated the Noid commercials for Domino’s Pizza and more, including Emmy-winning Claymation specials.