WILL VINTON’S FEATS OF CLAY ON SHOW

Like the Creator in the old Gene McDaniels song, Will Vinton and his artists create brand-new worlds out of a hundred pounds of clay. “Festival of Claymation” (at the Nuart) is a technically dazzling but sometimes unsatisfying survey of his recent short animated films and commercials.

The popular spots featuring a line of little clay raisins doing a funky dance to “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” have suddenly brought Vinton national prominence: Two 30-second commercials have attracted a larger audience than a decade of work as an independent film maker.

Until Vinton (and then partner Bob Gardiner) won the Academy Award for “Closed Mondays” in 1974, clay animation was regarded as a crude stop-motion technique, suitable only for children’s films. Since then, his Portland-based studio has won three more Oscar nominations and has proved that animators can use clay to depict every sort of movement, from subtle nuances of facial expression to fantastic metamorphoses.

Visually, the most impressive film in the program is “The Creation” (1981). Joan Gratz, one of Vinton’s top animators, uses streaks of brightly colored clay on plexiglass to produce glowing designs that resemble a moving oil painting. As God molds the world out of primordial chaos, the viewer sees powerful, subtly rendered images of His Michelangelo-esque hands in motion.

Billy, the clay break-dancer in the “Vanz Kant Danz” rock video (1985), moves more fluidly than singer John Fogerty does in the live-action sequences. The impressionist in “The Great Cognito” (1982) turns into three-dimensional caricatures of Adolf Hitler, Franklin Roosevelt, John Wayne and all three Andrews Sisters. An orphan boy walks through a snowy city with astonishing realism in “A Christmas Gift” (1980).

Despite their technical excellence, Vinton’s films sometimes fail to achieve their maximum impact because of weak stories and weaker sound tracks. The splendid visuals of “Creation” sink beneath James Earl Jones’ ponderous reading of James Weldon Johnson’s doggerel, “God’s Trombones.” The technical legerdemain of “Cognito” can’t disguise that it’s essentially a literal depiction of a bad stand-up comedy routine.

Tighter structures and more professional voices and music make some of the commercials more satisfying as films, including the dancing raisins, the obnoxious “Noid” who tries to squish Domino’s pizzas and a 3-D version of Jay Ward’s Cap’n Crunch character.

A sequence from the entertaining but poorly received feature, “The Adventures of Mark Twain by Huck Finn” (1985), suggests that Vinton is beginning to find better stories to illustrate. His animators deserve the best, as “Festival of Claymation” amply demonstrates.