Claydream review – claymation genius behind California Raisins tells own story
This documentary about animation maven Will Vinton, whose medium of preference was clay filmed in stop motion, covers his remarkable career in detail, with expected reverence. Strictly as a documentary it’s conventional and a bit snoozy, but animation geeks will revel in the chance it affords to learn more about Vinton, a mostly genial chap who nevertheless had some sharp corners to his character. While the narrative mostly follows a straight-ahead, chronological path through Vinton’s biography, the story comes with a classic parable about how small companies can end up crashing and burning, especially when they get mixed up with strictly material-minded MBAholders and aggressively controlling angel investors.
Then again, it’s clear Vinton also had himself partly to blame for his eventual business travails, although for the most part he ran a pretty profitable studio in Portland, Oregon, at a time when few film companies dared to operate more than 50 miles from downtown Los Angeles. Clearly made in cooperation with Vinton (who died in 2018) and his family, director Marq Evans looks back to his subject’s youthful enthusiasm for countercultural hedonism available around his early base in Berkeley, California, a scene that shaped his aesthetic. His first major work – Closed Mondays, co-directed by Bob Gardiner – was rejected by the first film festival they sent it to, but then eventually went on to win an Oscar for best animated short in 1975.
This introduces a further subplot about how Vinton fell out with the talented but erratic Gardiner, who may have been suffering from bipolar disorder. Still, without Gardiner, Vinton and his team went on to make some lovely work, including an adaptation of The Little Prince, and some less lovely but extraordinarily popular work, such as the adverts featuring singing raisins that became a franchise of sorts. In the light of that success, it doesn’t seem quite so crazy that at one point there was talk of starting a Vinton Studiothemed amusement park; this nugget of info is among many recounted here that seem outrageously unlikely but somehow typical of Vinton’s unusual career.
• Claydream is available on 21 November on digital platforms.