It’s no secret that Portland and its environs have become a nexus for the art and business of animation. In fact, the city has been at the forefront of the industry at least since Will Vinton first put fingers to clay in the early 1970s. The achievements of Laika Studios (Coraline, ParaNorman, and many others) and ShadowMachine (Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinnochio) have been celebrated with showcases at the Portland Art Museum and elsewhere, but a recent exhibition and lecture series at the Lakewood Center for the Arts in Lake Oswego brought together a fascinating constellation of animators, demonstrating the vast diversity of styles and methods within the field and Oregon’s preeminence in so many of them, especially the meticulous, crafted universe of stop motion.

Co-curated by Tiffany Schuster and the recently launched Museum of Stop Motion Animation, the event, Animation: Script to Screen, was the centerpiece of this year’s Lake Oswego Festival of the Arts, held from June 20-22. In addition to an exhibit exploring the techniques of stop motion and displaying dozens of objects used in the making of Pinocchio, Wendell & Wild, and other films, the weekend also offered a dizzying array of presentations from some of the most acclaimed animators working today. And, of course, it would be close to heresy to stage something like this in the Portland area without including local legend and Oregon City native Bill Plympton, who made the trip from his New York home to attend, conduct a master class in 2D animation, and screen his latest hand-drawn feature, Slide. Plympton describes Slide as “what if Mel Brooks became a cartoonist. It’s a wacky musical Western comedy with probably more bad guys than any other film ever made. I love drawing bad guys, and I wanted to draw as many bad guys as I could.” (This is of course extra impressive considering Plympton’s virtually unique status as an animator who draws every frame of his films himself and by hand.) Plotwise, he continues, the film follows “a wandering vigilante who comes into this small lumbering town that’s very corrupt. These two fat guys are ruling the village, tearing down the trees and rivers and lakes and just destroying everything. The good guy doesn’t have a gun, but he uses his slide guitar to defeat them and clean up the city.”

In his class, Plympton emphasized the practical side of his calling as well as the artistic. “I show people how it is possible to make a living being an independent animator,” he says. “I talk about the secrets of my success, and I’ll do a presentation on how I draw my famous characters. And I’ll look at people’s portfolios, too. I’m happy to do that.” The demands of the medium, especially as Plympton practices it, aren’t for everyone. “If you don’t like to draw, you’re probably in the wrong business. I get up at five in the morning and start drawing, and go to bed at eight at night after drawing all day.” Asked if he regrets having to take meal breaks, he simply replies, “I do.”

On the other end of the spectrum from Plympton’s work is the technically complex, studio-based work that Lead Animator Anthony Scott has excelled at for over 30 years. Scott, whose lecture on Saturday covered his remarkable career, got his start, remarkably enough, working for Art Clokey, the Claymation pioneer who created the character Gumby (and his equine sidekick Pokey). Like Plympton, Scott seems born to animate: “When I was seven years old, I was coming up with my own characters and stories and wanting to make them move. By the time I was eleven, I had found one or two books in the library on how to make animated films, and I got ahold of a Super 8 movie camera. I just started experimenting with cut-out animation, clay animation, shooting live-action stuff with friends, that sort of thing.” The opportunities for a budding animator weren’t extensive in Scott’s home state of Michigan, he recalls, so “when I was 21, I moved to California. Eventually I found out about a new Gumby TV series that was being shot in Sausalito, about twenty minutes from where I was. I sent in my demo reel on a VHS, and about two months later I got a call inviting me in for an interview with Art Clokey.” He got the job, despite having no formal training in film or animation.

From there, Clokey recommended Scott to Henry Selick, who was working on a series of 10-second bumpers for MTV (you remember, the ones where the channel’s logo would morph into all sorts of bizarre shapes and colors). That was in 1988, and since then Scott has worked with Selick on every one of his stop-motion features, from 1993’s The Nightmare Before Christmas to 2022’s Wendell & Wild. He was the senior stop-motion animator on the Oscar-winning Pinocchio, and personally took home an Emmy for his work on the opening credits of the 2009-2011 Showtime series The United States of Tara, which was done in a cut-out, two-dimensional style that’s worlds away from the Selick aesthetic.

“I’ve been really fortunate to work on so many different kinds of projects, not just big-budget feature films, but smaller, experimental things,” he says. “That freshens things up for me. A movie is a longer job and that’s great. But smaller projects give you time and opportunity to experiment, and that keeps it exciting.” Scott is especially fond of his work on the 2015 film The Little Prince, which involved a lot of elaborate paper animation. Having risen up the ranks over the years, he’s also developed a preference for more hands-on roles. “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride was my first big supervising role. I had to work with all the department heads—puppets, sets, props—and then very closely with the director to make sure everything’s going to work for us. That’s great, and I can do that, but it takes you away from the creative part. After Coraline I decided to go back to just animating and performance, which is what I like to focus on the most.”

There’s a reason this cinematic form is called “animation.” Taking unliving objects and imbuing them with movement, personality, and, yes, a sort of life is, as Scott puts it, “really magical.” And the handmade, artisanal nature of stop-motion never lets you forget that there’s an actual human behind it all. Two relatively recent developments complicate that relationship: computer-generated imagery and artificial intelligence. While recognizing those concerns, Scott isn’t a purist or a Luddite. “I’m okay with some CGI,” he says. “We definitely try to keep it stop-motion as much as we can, but if you have a huge crowd shot—you know, a hundred zombies chasing your character—you need to use CG figures made up to look like stop-motion figures.”

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Scott’s also been around long enough to be wary of doom-and-gloom talk. “You know,” he says, “when Toy Story and Jurassic Park came out, a lot of people thought ‘That’s it, stop-motion is truly dead.’ It had been kind of dead already since the 1970s. The Nightmare Before Christmas came out the same year as Jurassic Park, and it was nominated for the Best Visual Effects Oscar. Jurassic Park won, of course, but then more stop-motion features were made. Nightmare was kind of the first in a series, and then Laika got going, and Aardman Animations started cranking out features. And here we are.”

The more optimistic take on the encroachment of technology is that the ubiquity of cameras and apps on smartphones allow almost anyone to experiment with making stop-motion films. That spirt of exploration and nearly unfettered creativity will surely lead to developments in animation, and cinema in general, that can barely be dreamt of today. The companies mentioned so far in this piece, from Aardman to Laika to ShadowMachine, were all represented at Animation: Script to Screen, but so was the late, lamented Will Vinton Studios.

Webster Colcord, who worked with Vinton on some of his early efforts (including Meet the Raisins) and went on to be a mainstay at Oscar-winner Phil Tippett’s animation studio, also gave a presentation titled “Monsters, Mayhem, and Mistakes: A Career in Hollywood Animation” that included rarely, if ever, seen clips of his work from the 1980s to the present day. Colcord also re-created the set of a Rainier Beer commercial that Vinton and then-partner Bob Gardiner shot in 1975 so that it could be paired in the exhibit with the actual camera track used in the production. This fifty-year-old piece of wooden equipment may as well be a piece of the True Cross for its significance as a relic of the origins of the Portland area’s ability to produce and attract world-class animation talent. It was a thoroughly appropriate centerpiece for this celebration of an art form, and a place, unlike any other.