history
Claymation: Clokey, Vinton, and the Road to Laika
Clay animation
Definition
"Claymation" is not a generic synonym for clay stop motion -- it is a trademarked name Will Vinton coined for his own studio's process in the late 1970s, built on top of Art Clokey's 1950s revival of clay as a mainstream animation material. The studio Vinton built around the term was later taken from him and, in July 2005, renamed Laika.
Overview
Clay had been animated on and off almost since the start of film, but it took Art Clokey to make it a mainstream form. A 1953 USC student film, Gumbasia, applied the "kinesthetic" animation method Clokey learned from his professor Slavko Vorkapic to lumps of clay instead of drawings; producer Sam Engel saw it and encouraged Clokey to build children's characters and stories around the technique. The result, Gumby, got its first pilot green-lit by NBC's Tom Sarnoff in 1955 and ran for decades -- establishing clay as a durable animation material rather than a novelty, years before the term used for it today existed.
"Claymation" itself comes from a specific studio, not the technique in general. Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner spent 1973-74 filming Closed Mondays in Vinton's basement -- an eight-minute short needing 11,520 individual shots, every frame requiring the clay to be hand-resculpted -- and after early rejection at a Portland festival it won prizes at nearly a hundred festivals, including Cannes, then the 1975 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film: the first stop-motion film to win that category. Vinton followed it with a behind-the-scenes short, Claymation: Three Dimensional Clay Animation, and coined and trademarked the name from it specifically to distinguish his own studio's work from the wave of imitators the technique's popularity invited.
The exact year is worth pinning to the federal trademark record rather than repeating conflicting secondary claims. Vinton's own company -- later renamed Laika, Inc., and still the mark's owner of record today -- filed CLAYMATION as a U.S. trademark on June 6, 1979 (Serial No. 73218588), listing June 1, 1978 as the mark's first use in commerce, and the registration issued July 7, 1981, covering "custom production of animated motion picture films and animated commercial advertisements." That 1978 first-use date lines up with the making-of short Claymation: Three Dimensional Clay Animation, not the "1976" figure some secondary summaries repeat. A second, separate CLAYMATION registration (Serial No. 74522367), filed directly by Will Vinton Studios, Inc. on May 4, 1994 and registered May 23, 1995, lapsed for non-renewal in February 2006 -- about six months after the July 2005 Laika rename -- while the original 1979 mark simply carried over under the company's new name and was not cancelled until January 2022.
Vinton Studios grew through The Adventures of Mark Twain, one of the first all-clay animated features, the mainstream-facing California Raisins advertising campaign, and the television series The PJs. That growth needed capital the studio didn't have: Nike co-founder Phil Knight began investing in 1998 and took control in 2002 as cancelled TV projects and a post-9/11 advertising downturn strained the business. Vinton was ousted from the company that bore his name six months after Knight's son Travis joined its board, taking a $125,000 severance against stock once valued near $20 million.
Knight rebuilt the shell of Vinton Studios rather than closing it: in July 2005 it was rebranded Laika, split into a features division (Laika Entertainment) and a commercials division (Laika/house), with Henry Selick -- director of The Nightmare Before Christmas -- joining as a supervising director the year before the rename and Travis Knight eventually becoming president and CEO. Coraline (2009) was Laika's first feature under the new name; the studio's own Dragonframe-based production pipeline (see dragonframe) is the direct professional-scale descendant of the clay technique Clokey popularised and Vinton branded.