Word: clay
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...Williams played host to the three-day Inter-Collegiate Sailing Association’s Foster Trophy, the national championship for the singlehanded competitors. Light conditions on Sunday condensed the event down to two days, with each participant racing a total of 12 times. The Crimson qualified both senior captain Clay Johnson and junior Kyle Kovacs for the event, and Johnson’s 77 points helped him finish third in his final singlehanded championship, while Kovacs was right behind in fourth place with 79 points. Stanford’s Emery Wager won the event with a 61-point total...
...Studios they make art by hand, in a form called stop-motion animation whose history stretches back to the first days of cinema. It certainly goes back to the solitary youths of many Aardmanites. Nick Park, the studio's resident genius, was one of those kids who played with clay in a corner of his Lancashire home until, like Dr. Praetorius in Bride of Frankenstein, he made those little figures come alive...
...with talking animals, and his short films with Wallace the cheese-loving suburban inventor and Gromit his mutely heroic dog, can match any animated films of the past 20 years. But the process cannot be delightful. Most American animators would say it's daft, all that precision-toying with clay, when, these days, computers can do so much of the work...
...pretty splendid, with an imaginative scope and attention to detail that might have taken decades to realize if each piece had to be constructed and painted, rather than simply texted and input. You certainly won't see thumbprints on the characters, as were occasionally visible in the fingers-on-clay movies. This one is as polished as a formica table top in the kitchen of a neat-freak housewife. The question is whether the Aardmen lost some of stop-motion's charm, its humanity, when they went digital...
...brained scheme, like the ones Wallace is always hatching, needing Gromit to extricate him? Or does it represent the inevitable next step? Once the Aardmen have made a film with computer, can they return to the old ways? Go back home? How're ya gonna keep 'em playing with clay after they've gone 3-D? And how many consecutive rhetorical questions can I pose...