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One of the first (of many) mistakes I made as a young WW staffer in the early ‘90s was calling Will Vinton the winner of Portland’s first Academy Award.
It was a throwaway line in an Oscars wrap-up piece mentioning Vinton’s 1975 honors for Best Short Animated Film. I didn’t know much about Vinton back then. I hadn’t seen the winning short, Closed Mondays. I thought animation was for kids.
Soon after the paper hit the streets, the front desk paged me. Part of my job was to deal with the disgruntled, enraged, semi-lucid readers who stormed our office at Northwest 2nd Avenue and Burnside Street each week to register their complaints.
In the lobby, I found a man quaking with fury like a Tasmanian devil. He was holding an actual golden Academy Award above his head and attempting to strike me with it. One of its edges sliced my hand.
This man was Bob Gardiner, who was, in fact, co-winner with Vinton of the Oscar.
Gardiner (who died in 2005, bitter about Vinton till the end) claimed that he, not Vinton, was responsible for the revolutionary stop-motion animation technique that would become known as Claymation.
This encounter taught me a couple of lessons. One: Double- and triple-check your facts no matter how small they seem. Two: Getting things exactly right is hard. There’s almost always some detail, some tiny point you will overlook.
Will Vinton was the master of small details. Stop-motion animation is almost impossibly laborious and time-consuming. The eight minutes of Closed Mondays took 18 months to make.
Vinton went on to create memorable characters like the California Raisins, the Domino’s Pizza Noid, and the M&M personalities. He also produced and directed The Adventures of Mark Twain in 1985, which some consider the first full-length animated feature designed to appeal to adults as much as children (Studio Ghibli was founded the same year). His studios employed hundreds of animators and technicians.
In 2003, after rancorous financial difficulties at his namesake studios, Vinton was forced out. The company evolved into Laika, under the direction of Phil Knight’s son Travis, who had worked under Vinton as an animator.
Vinton died of cancer in 2018. Despite his difficult departure from his studio, he remained bullish on the future of animation and the work being done by studios like Laika, Pixar, and Aardman Animations (which makes the Wallace and Gromit films). In addition to Laika, the Portland area now supports numerous animation studios and artists laboring daily to make sure they get every detail exactly right.
Watch: Find Closed Mondays on YouTube and The Adventures of Mark Twain on several streaming platforms. Be on the lookout for Laika’s next release sometime in 2025. It’s Wildwood, based on the book written by Portland musician Colin Meloy and illustrated by his wife, artist Carson Ellis. We think Vinton would be proud.
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