On Film

WILL VINTON started out smail, an unknown with a lotta heart and guts to spare. His first effort, crude, untutored, won an Oscar. Okay, it's inconsequential, a tiny splash in that shark-infested pond called Show Business, but it was something. A start. A beginning. And now, after years of hard work, he's hit the big time--Domino's Pizza commericials.

Festival of Claymation

Produced and directed by Will Vinton

At the Coolidge Corner

Vinton is not your average pretty face. In fact, his face can turn inside out, or metamorphose into Mr. Spock or the Andrews Sisters of a battleship. Vinton is the inventor of Claymation, that nifty process of filming multicolored clay figures in stop-motion, to make people and animals and dinosaurs and lots and lots of money.

Say you make raisins. You're a raisin maker, trying to bring home an honest dollar. And then this guy comes up to you and tells you he can make your raisins dance and gyrate and actually beat up other snacks, karate-chopping the potato chips and kicking the party-mix in the nuts. And all the while they're singing "Heard It Through the Grapevine." With real soul, too.

The raisin makers went for it, as did Kentucky Fried Chicken, Aim Toothpaste, Captain Crunch, and an insurance company. Wise choice: The commercials resulting, the highlight of this retrospective sampling from Vinton's studio, are far more memorable than the products they hawk.

As to be expected, it took a while for Vinton to realize the inventive possibilities of his sticky form. The first half of the Festival, sadly omitting his Oscar-winning short Closed Mondays, gets bogged down in an interminable mini-documentary explaining his method and then some truly clayey early pieces, in which his artists inexplicably try to make the figures look and act just like real people, which is silly, because real people can't explode their heads and come up smiling and these figures can and it seems silly to waste the talent.

Things pick up with Dinosaur, a short educational film in which a grade-schooler's show-and tell starts leaping off the blackboard and showing its fangs. A few of his order independent shorts are also worthwhile, but it takes the big-bucks of advertising to give the Men and Women of Clay a chance to fly. The program whizzes through the ads to the best thing ever shown on MTV, John Fogerty's "Vanz Kant Danz" video, featuring a snivelling pig in a transformation sequence that is equalled only by the final and best short, "The Great Cognito," in which a nightclub impersonator's head actually becomes an entire ware movie. Shrapnel and everything.

Also worth a note is the frame-sequences, featuring a skinny dinosaur and a fat...a fat something arguing in a movie theater on a show called "Freak Previews." The resemblances are amazing, as are the levels of violence reached as the two chew each other out. As it were.

This is all happy, happy stuff, but if you've been watching lots of television like a healthy American kid you've already seen the best stuff. Those who are interested in animation should take note: this technique offers the solidity of computer animation with the versatility of a pencil.

And those who are sitting through the entirety of "Amerika" hoping to see the next Raisin Board Commercial should bag it and instead catch this show at the doomed Coolidge Corner. But now that Vinton has been discovered by corporate America, we'll be seeing more and more of his stuff whether we like it or not. I for one am buying stock in Play-do.