page_title: Clay animation
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Clay animation / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Stills from Battle of the Suds and other clay animations by pioneer Helena Smith-Dayton, published in Popular Science Monthly February 1917
context_page_description: Clay animation or claymation, sometimes plasticine animation, is one of many forms of stop-motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is "deformable"—made of a malleable substance, usually plasticine clay.
  Traditional animation, from cel animation to stop motion, is produced by recording each frame, or still picture, on film or digital media and then playing the recorded frames back in rapid succession before the viewer. These and other moving images, from zoetrope to films and video games, create the illusion of motion by playing back at over ten to twelve frames per second. The techniques involved in creating computer-generated imagery are conversely generally removed from a frame-by-frame process.
context_section_description: William Harbutt developed plasticine in 1897. To promote his educational "Plastic Method" he made a handbook that included several photographs that displayed various stages of creative projects. The images suggest phases of motion or change, but the book did probably not have a direct influence on clay animation films. Still, the plasticine product would become the favourite  product for clay animators, as it did not dry and harden (unlike normal clay) and was much more malleable than its harder and greasier Italian predecessor plastilene.
  Edwin S. Porter's Fun in a bakery shop (1902) shows a single shot of a baker quickly transforming a patch of dough into different faces. It reflects the vaudeville type of "lightning sketches" that J. Stuart Blackton filmed in The Enchanted Drawing (1902) with the addition of stop tricks, and with early cinematic animation in Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906). A similar form of "lightning sculpting" had been performed live on stage around the turn of the century.
  Segundo de Chomón's Sculpteur Moderne was released on 31 January 1908 and features heaps of clay molding themselves into detailed sculptures that are capable of minor movements. The final sculpture depicts an old woman and walks around before it's picked up, squashed and molded back into a sitting old lady.
  On 15 February 1908, Porter released the trick film A Sculptor's Welsh Rabbit Dream that featured clay molding itself into three complete busts. No copy of the film has yet been located. It was soon followed by the similar extant film The Sculptor's Nightmare (6 May 1908), directed by Wallace McCutcheon Sr. and photographed by Billy Bitzer with cameo appearances of D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett. The busts are also animated to blink, speak, drink and turn left and right for a short sequence.
  J. Stuart Blackton's Chew Chew Land; or, The Adventures of Dolly and Jim (1910) features primitive clay animation in chewing-gum inspired dream scenes.
  Walter R. Booth's Animated Putty (1911) featured clay molding itself into different shapes.
  Willie Hopkins produced over fifty clay-animated segments entitled Miracles in Mud for the weekly Universal Screen Magazine from 1916 to 1918. He also made artistic modeled titles for the movie Everywoman (1919).
  New York artist Helena Smith Dayton, possibly the first female animator, had much success with her "Caricatypes" clay statuettes before she began experimenting with clay animation. Some of her first resulting short films were screened on 25 March 1917. She released an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet circa half a year later. Although the films and her technique received much attention from the press, it seems she did not continue making films after she returned to New York from managing a YMCA in Paris around 1918. None of her films have yet surfaced, but the extant magazine articles have provided several stills and circa 20 poorly printed frames from two film strips.
  By the 1920s, drawn animation using either cels or the slash system was firmly established in the U.S. as the dominant mode of animation production. Increasingly, three-dimensional forms such as clay were driven into relative obscurity as the cel method became the preferred method for the studio cartoon. Cel animation can be more easily divided into small tasks performed by many workers, like an assembly line.
  In 1921, clay animation appeared in a short sequence in the Out of the Inkwell episode Modeling, a film from the newly formed Fleischer Brothers studio. Modeling included animated clay in eight shots, a novel integration of the technique into an existing cartoon series and one of the rare uses of clay animation in a theatrical short from the 1920s.
  The oldest known extant clay animation film (with clay animation as its main production method) is Long Live the Bull (1926) by Joseph Sunn.
  Art Clokey's short student film Gumbasia (1955) featured all kinds of clay objects changing shape and moving to a jazz tune. He also created the iconic character Gumby that would feature in segments in Howdy Dood
caption: stills from Battle of the Suds and other Helena Smith-Dayton films (1917)
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