My Interview with Will Vinton from c.1998

Will Vinton died today. His claymation animation was beloved world-wide.  

I did this piece for a web magazine in either 1998 or 1999. That magazine has since bid the internet farewell and I can't remember the name of it. I also wrote stories on John Waters and Hardy Fox of the Residents for them.

Thought it might be nice to see this again.

--- Tom D'Antoni

 By Tom D'Antoni

            Will Vinton isn’t merely the world’s best known clay animation artist; he invented and copyrighted the term "Claymation." They were his California Raisins, it was his Noid, his M&M’s, his Ozzie the Elf,  his action figure driving the red Nissan in the "coolest spot of the year" in 1996, according to Rolling Stone. He directed the first full length Claymation feature film, "The Adventures of Mark Twain."

             And they’re his "Foamation" characters in Eddie Murphy’s Fox series, "PJ’s" (Monday nights). Foamation, also trademarked, is the same as Claymation, just in a slightly different medium. Vinton likes to call them "dimensional animation."

            The use of stop-motion filmmaking; the one-frame-at-a-time, move-the-little-figure-a-quarter-inch-and-raise-its-left-eyebrow-slightly technique, although perfected by Vinton, was not invented by him.

            We can go back to 1933, and the original King Kong for the first breakthrough for that. Or maybe we can go all the way back to Edward Muybridge’s horses- in-the-air, frame-by-frame studies of animals and people in motion.

            Vinton does not claim Gumby and Pokey, early clay stop-motion stars, as an influence, although he must have seen them as a kid, growing up in the 1950’s, a little south of Portland, Oregon.

            Plenty of others have been influenced by Vinton, however, including Henry Selik’s work in "The Nightmare Before Christmas," and music videos like Peter Gabriel’s "Sledgehammer." Many others influenced by Vinton have ended up working for him as part of the 250 people living out their fantasies at Will Vinton Studios, which occupies nearly a square block in Portland.

            Portland is also the birthplace of Simpson’s creator, Matt Groening.

As a Portland resident, I can tell you it isn’t the legendary rain that is the coincidental inspiration for having America’s top two animators being born there.

            Computer generated imagery (CGI) is a huge part of the studio’s output these days, something Vinton likes to blend with dimensional animation and live action.

            He is an Academy Award winner, and a laid-back, Northwest, jeans and sweater kinda guy. Last week, he refilled his coffee cup, twirled his blonde handlebar mustache and answered questions.

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Q:        How did you get involved with “PJ’s”

A:        I got a phone call from Ron Howard he said he and Eddie Murphy had pitched an idea to Peter Roth the head of Fox Broadcasting. He said they wanted to do it in dimensional animation.

            It sounded great..

            We went down and spent some time with Eddie and Ron. Eddie had 15 or 20 great characters which came right out of his own personal life experiences. Funny stuff. He would free-associate with them. It clearly looked like a great project from the beginning.

            It was on the basis of those characters that we started to hone it down to a smaller group. Eddie wanted to be the lead character, he didn’t want to do all the voices, because he had already done that on other shows.

            I went down to Miami to record Eddie for a demo script. I’ve worked with a lot of people, directing, but Eddie is a superstar. There were a couple of times when he really burned me well, really appropriately. I’m trying to direct him to do certain kinds of black characters. Here’s this guy from Portland, Oregon suggesting things like that. Eddie does such great imitations of white doing imitations of black guy. Like myself. (He laughs.) He’s wild.

Q:        Did he improvise?

A:        A lot. And the improvisation mixed with the script resulted in a demo which ultimately sold the series.

            We went through an incredible process of character design. We did screen tests of different characters with Eddie’s voice, different styles of animation, and played them against each other, literally like a screen test. It was a wonderful process. We took the time to make sure that we weren’t going with a first knee-jerk reaction to things. It has paid off with something really unique.

Q:        Given that it took you three and a half years to make “The Adventures of Mark Twain,” it must have been quite a process to gear up for a weekly series.

A:        It’s an absolutely amazing process. It’s a feat of production management that’s unprecedented, at least in the U.S. It’s the first series done in dimensional animation, but it’s the first show of any kind, cell animation or otherwise that’s produced wholly in the United States as opposed to farming it out to Korea or Taiwan.

            One of the things we wanted to do right from the beginning was to bring feature film quality animation, art direction, lighting to television. What’s made it possible has been some really innovative production management processes that have allowed for everybody to work as such a great team and keeping the directors and the animators completely busy and focused on their task which is to bring those characters to life one at a time.

Q:        Was that your job?

A:        No, I’m the opposite of that. I’m much more of a director and I had my doubts originally that  it could stay a creative process and be a big systematized thing, but I’ve been turned into a believer by the people who have done that. I can brag about it cause it has nothing to do with me.

Q:        What DO you do?

A:        My involvement in the show is strictly creative upfront, creating characters, getting the demo launched.

Q:        But you’re not divorced from the production.

A:        Oh, no, no no. I’m working more as an executive overseeing, more as a producer, my creative role was getting it rolling, getting the characters styled, the animation established.

Q:        The character style says something to me about race relations. About the use of caricatures of black folks.

A:        Comics have been doing it for a long time. Eddie Murphy is one of those. Things like “In Living Color” have done it, but not in animation. The 90’s have been breaking out of the 80’s which were so politically correct. Especially in the Fox lineup, you see a lot of Homer Simpsons and Al Bundys, those kinds of characters who are white men, in their “natural” state, being completely oblivious to what’s politically correct. To that extent this is  following that tradition with black characters and a black creator, Eddie Murphy. I think it’s part of the natural evolution of things.

            It is interesting to see, when you look back over decades of time, how things that people were too afraid to talk about, open up. It’s natural that humor leads the way in those kinds of things. The taboo issues are the best material for comedy.

Q:        Do you watch it when it airs?

A:        Yeah, I find seeing it there in the context gives me much more feedback. I like to see the commercials, I like to see how the show and the story bumps up against the breaks. I like to see the nature of the advertisers. I feel like I’m still a student of television, trying to understand what it’s going to be.

Q:        What other projects are you involved in now, that you can talk about?

A:        I’m currently developing a couple of projects. I can’t talk TOO much about them because of the nature of the beast. We have a pilot we’re working on called “Klay’s TV” that’s a prime-time sketch show. Pretty interesting cause it has a lot of different styles of animation all within one show. That’s also for Fox.

            We also just sold a pilot called “Animals Anonymous”, “AA” for NBC, also a prime-time show.

Q:        “Hello, my name is John, I’m a giraffe?”

A:        Yeah, you’ve got the idea. It’s a pretty fun thing. It’s about a time in our history where animals have evolved to the place where they’re getting jobs, living alongside humans in the great melting pot of New York City. They are coping with civilized life in the big city, which is at poles with their animal instincts. Very much an analogy of our human state, but told through animals.

Q:        What is it with you and anthropomorphics? I remember you made Siskel and Ebert animals in one of your films.

A:        Dinosaurs. It’s pretty much a staple of animation,  after all. They weren’t actually Siskel and Ebert first, they were dinosaurs first. And then you go, “What are you gonna do with dinosaurs?” Two critics who fight with each other all the time, it’s such a natural.

            Characters are funny, they have a life of their own. They’re like actors. We had a character years ago called Wilshire Pig that existed in little  productions here and there. He hung around the studio in sculpted form at various times. It’s kind of like they’re begging for a new role. In his case we did a couple of prime-time specials for CBS starring him. It was his shot at the big time. They evolve as time goes on, as “PJ’s” characters will.

            Even in the first thirteen episodes, the characters are becoming much sharper as we get to the end of the thirteen. They’re getting much better.

Q:        Why did you decide to make the tops of the “PJ’s” characters so big?

A:        Playing with the designs. So much of a character’s attitude, expression comes out of it’s face. So much of that is in the eyes, it’s kind of natural to let those features be larger than life in order to let them be more expressive than life.

            Thurgood (the Eddie Murphy character), in our screen tests, had several different designs, some of them were quite realistic. And then others were quite abstracted. I think we ended up with a character that was in between. But if we hadn’t done that screen test, everybody but everybody would have picked that realistic character right off the top. Realism is the common denominator for everybody. It’s the denominator for all ideas, the place where we all can agree in a hurry. Abstraction is always a much more difficult thing to agree on, to get consensus on.

            A character really isn’t about his physical design as it is about his animation design, his performance. So, by taking these rather different designs and then building a style of animation around that look, it really allowed us to explore what the show was going to feel like more than what the characters simply looked like. It’s a process I like to go through with everything we design. Sometimes you end up having to go with a little bit more the common denominator approach when you have clients and people have strong opinions about it. It’s definitely not the best way to go.

Q:        Do you remember the first clay thing you made?

A:        As a kid, the first clay things I did were army men that I put on boats and ran down this little creek that ran through a park next to my house and basically bomb them. It was a boy thing to do. There was a neighbor kid who had fireworks, we would make things and blow them up. Clay was great for that because the heads would blow off, arms and so on, it was pretty cool.

Q:        When did you begin capturing these things on film?

A:        In college I started messing with stop-motion animation. You can just experiment over beers and pizza and a table-top setup with clay, a single-frame camera and some buddies, and sort of see what you can do to make this clay dance and come to life. And to see if you can outdo the other person.

Q:        What was it that made you become an animator?

A:        There wasn’t one thing. It was a product of many many different kinds of  interests and disciplines. I studied architecture in school. Before that, physics. But I was also very interested in music and theater. In terms of film, I respected the classic works that Walt Disney did and Chuck Jones, and people like that that I paid attention to.

            In terms of clay, I was inspired by a little known work by Ellie Noyes called, “Clay Origin of the Species.” It was a rather simple, crude clay animation of dinosaurs. It was the evolution of the species where all these lumps of clay and dinosaur-like things are eating each other up, evolving, all done to jazz music. It was a pretty simple film but amazingly effective. There was a reality to it that was striking.

            Working with architectural models got me into experimenting. I did things like reconstructions of buildings as models with friends in architecture and we’d animate people going through them to try to bring them to life. I found early on the power of filming when my professors were so dazzled by doing a presentation on film as opposed to on paper. That got me excited about exploring.

            I  guess my influences in film have been more in live action, special effects movies as anything that’s been in animation.

Q:        Although everybody knows you for the California raisins, there is a wide variety of styles in your work. Some of it very painterly.

A:        We’ve been a “studio” for a long time. I started it out as my own thing, doing short films, but for a long time now, I’ve always had the desire to nurture directors with different points of view and styles. We have a dozen or so, really solid directors, each one of whom has their own style. That’s been an important thing for us.

We got pigeon-holed a little bit with Claymation,  after the California Raisins. People began to think that’s what Claymation was, or that was the company was. It’s funny how the success of something like that can sometimes work against you if what you’re trying to do is a variety of styles. That got us into exploring computer animation, and now that’s half of our business.

Q:        Is there anything that delights you that you really really want to do right now?

A:        I’ve always felt that what we do and what animators tend to be really good at is short comedy gags and shorts, as opposed to long-form narratives. Long-form narrative is quite alive and well in animation today, but I think the real superstrength is short concepts. That’s where the “Klay’s TV” project comes in. I’ve been nurturing that concept for many years, trying to create a program that utilizes animation directors’ best skills in a format that’s viable for television.

            Short films have died in this country, and that’s too bad, because they’ve been a great proving ground, experimental ground for animators in the past. It still exists in other countries as a great place for innovation. In this country because there’s no outlet for short films, the commercial has become the replacement for that. Innovative stuff happens in commercials, and that’s one of the great things about being a commercial company. It gives us a chance to try different techniques. It’s the most important thing, almost, in advertising, is finding fresh approaches, things that pop out.

            The problem in commercials is that you don’t get to tell your own story, your gag. So the idea of making short films is something that is very exciting to me and I hope we’ll be doing more of that.