‘ClayDream’ Review: A Lively Look at Stop-Motion Maestro Will Vinton

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticThe book of Genesis contains two competing creation stories: There’s the one where an all-powerful deity conjures everything in six days, and the version where a more anthropomorphic god rolls up his heavenly sleeves and makes man from clay.Guess which one visionary stop-motion artist Will Vinton would have preferred.Co-inventor of the “Claymation” technique, Vinton wanted to be the second Walt Disney.

Colorful eyegasm “ClayDream” celebrates all that Will Vinton Studios achieved — its most beloved characters include the California Raisins, rabbit-eared Domino’s Pizza menace “the Noid” and Eddie Murphy series “The PJs” — while musing about what might have been, had control of the company not been wrested away from him by Nike honcho Phil Knight, who rechristened it Laika and put his son Travis in charge.

That was an unhappy end for Vinton’s career, to be sure, but like the Old Testament itself, the saga has multiple versions. Director Marq Evans does his best to take the “Rashomon”-like mix of occasionally contradictory memories by artists, exes and former colleagues of Vinton’s and fashion them into a cohesive narrative, introducing the 2004 Vinton v.

Knight case early as the proverbial sword of Damocles to his narrative.“ClayDream” is a cleverly packaged oral history exercise, centered around an interview with Vinton himself, who is shown being treated for multiple myeloma during the film (he died in 2018).