11/29/2023 0 Comments Best spot for magical clay![]() But it's all very magical, and what you walk away with is delight - in the segues, in the humor, in the sheer audacity of active imaginations. True, claymation is not a smooth as classical cell animation and many of figures are delightfully caricatured (including Vinton himself). There's also one Vinton video, for John Fogerty's "Vanz Kant Danz."Īfter 80 minutes, you may forget all of this is animation. ![]() Those hard-working raisins are relatively simple creations compared with those in witty sequences for California Fresh Eggs and Nike Shoes. Of course, Will Vinton's no martyr to art, and there's a healthy sampling of his commercial work as well - the most familiar being his hilarious "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" spots for the California Raisin Board and his Pizza Noid spots for Domino's. "A Christmas Gift" is a lovely fable with a familiar theme, while "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is a snippet from Vinton's recent feature-length Twain film. Time doesn't stand still for Vinton it tap-dances, and you wish all history could be this artful.Ĭlaymation is a high-tech process, but Vinton uses it mostly to recount history or to revive that most ancient art, storytelling. "Dinosaur" is a poignant overview of that long-extinct race, with the information distilled through a child's point of view. All things are possible and plausible in claymation come to think of it, all things are probable, as well. Both are compelling, and what makes them work is the fluid, visually evolutionary nature of claymation, which condenses and compresses even as it gives flight to fancy and imagination. Two are specifically about the origin of life: "Legacy" offers the Big Bang/evolution theory, while "Creation" offers the biblical explanation by way of the poet James Weldon Johnson. Which may explain why so many of the works here deal in one way or another with creation. ![]() In the hands of Vinton and his hard-working crew, every figure is a Pinocchio, and watching the painstaking work in progress can be exhausting in itself. One fairly long "Festival" segment offers a behind-the-scenes look at just how much planning, coordination and sweat go into every one of those frames, from clay pigmentation to molding characters to live-action modeling to sound-and-sight sync. Sometimes as many as 60 elements are changed in each frame, but claymation is never just a succession of still lifes. Like animation in its golden age, claymation is a time-consumingprocess: For every second of film, each clay-sculpted figure must be oh-so-slightly adjusted and filmed 24 times. "Will Vinton's Festival of Claymation" is a bright, provocative and frequently mind-expanding collection of short films and commercials, strung together by the running (and running and running) commentary of the fatuous and quarrelsome dinosaur critics Rex and Herb, whose "Freak Previews" are wickedly accurate parodies of Siskel and Ebert. Vinton, who won the best-animation Oscar in 1974 for "Closed Mondays," pioneered the three-dimensional, stop-motion technique known as claymation. ![]() It's a stunning confluence of surreal segues and non sequiturs, and it's the heart of Will Vinton's art. Douglas MacArthur (with Harry Truman popping out his pipe), a gargantuan battleship and a sneaky submarine, the Andrews Sisters (one head, three pairs of lips), a gaggle of Japanese soldiers shooting automatic cameras, and more, more, more. "The Great Cognito" is a stand-up chameleon, a manic lounge impressionist who not only speaks in dozens of voices but also transforms himself with every breath of his monologue into the leading players of World War II.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |