Gumbasia

Before Davey & Golliath,and certainly before Gumby,Art Clokey produced a short stop motion animated film of various lumps of clay of different colours swirling around,changing shapes,all to a mostly jazzy music score (the film was shot silent). This film was screened to a executive at 20th Century Fox,who was so impressed,that he soon after drew up a contract for Clokey to create a series of claymation shorts for children's television. That series,of course,was Gumby,which ran for years (and spawned at least a couple of feature films featuring the little green clay boy & his orange pony,Pokey). Gumbasia is one of several non Gumby shorts that were also filmed,incorporating various realms of animation (Lawn Party,a 1956 black & white short was filmed using pixilation,a form of stop motion animation,using people as it's subject was another very funny short). Released long before the ratings system,there is absolutely nothing to offend anybody.

Art Clokey's "Gumbasia" is considered by many to have been the first claymation movie, and the movie which later influenced the Gumby cartoons (or claytoons, if you will). Certainly in its use of stop-motion it's innovative to some extent, despite the fact that the first film containing claymation was in 1908 (with Segundo de Chomón's "Modern Sculptors"). The masterfully-handled animation, created only by a college student, uses blobs of clay to create an alternate universe in its artful use of the substance, one in which the only hint at human life is a smiling face with a winking eye.

"Gumbasia" is only three minutes in length, but it uses the precious time it has to experiment with the boundaries of a ping-pong table (for a work surface), a huge amount of clay, and a camera. In the film, a whole world is created using clay to make shapes, such as a cube or sphere, patterns--using (I presume) fabrics, and many other impressions. The different colors of clay contort, mix, and shape to create all sorts of abstract images. It's a nonstop experimentation with stop-motion, occasionally using slow camera zooms to show the alternate dimension Clokey has created. The maker of the art clearly had talent, and exceeds far more creativity than the average home movie. Also, the addition of the jazz track works excellent with the visuals and creates just the feel Clokey was obviously going for.

One of the previous reviewers has failed to see any interest in "Gumbasia", and while I respect his opinion, I cannot help pointing out that he is clearly not an art geek and thus has no appreciation for abstract art. I, on the other hand, enjoy experimental cinema and find it sad that Clokey did not continue exploring impressionism. The Gumby cartoons do explore fantasy worlds to some extent, but not at the level this does. I recommend this artwork to anyone who can appreciate abstraction, and not to someone who can't enjoy it. If you see it, watch the full color version, which has a brighter and more appealing look than the washed out, faded-color version.

Some of my American friends are huge fans of the Gumby animation shorts by Art Clokey, which don't appeal to me at all. Invariably, it turns out that these people first encountered Gumby when they were small children. I never even heard of Gumby until I was well stuck into adulthood and I had already encountered more sophisticated (and more recent) examples of stop-action animation and claymation. Still, even by the standard of their own time -- the 1950s -- the Gumby toons aren't very impressive. Norman McLaren and George Pal were already doing far more sophisticated stop-motion animation and pixilation, in McLaren's case with no bigger a budget than Clokey's.

The wistful title 'Gumbasia' suggests that Clokey wanted this to be his equivalent of Disney's 'Fantasia': an art film with images and sounds but no story. Seen from a modern viewpoint, this is a very primitive example of claymation from the prehistoric Plasticine Era.

Against a soundtrack of some jazz-ish riffs, we see bits and blobs of clay rolling about aimlessly. At several points during an early sequence, we see a sphere of clay (and its shadow) rolling across a blank background; there's no other object in the frame, so there's no relative motion. I suspect that Clokey achieved these shots in real time, merely panning the camera past a static ball of clay and then allowing the editing to imply that the clay is rolling past a static camera, a stop-motion effect that would have taken much longer to film. At the end of this sequence, two blobs of clay roll towards each other and colllide: this bit was definitely filmed in stop-motion.

Despite its brevity, I found 'Gumbasia' completely unengaging right up until the very last shot, when a crude clay face suddenly winks its eye at us and smiles. For that brief instant, this film came alive for me, with this clay face far more engaging than all the blobs and balls which have preceded it. This only proves that film is most interesting when it's about human beings (or characters we can accept as human substitutes) rather than special effects. Mostly for its historic value, I'll rate 'Gumbasia' 3 out of 10.