Chapter 6 Animate Clay History Clay animation has been around for as long as cinema. Stuart Blackton used clay in The Adventures of Dollie andJim in 1910, and Willis O'Brien animated clay boxers over wooden armatures in 1914. O'Brien gradually refined his methods by turning to rubber puppets and metal armatures. There will be more about O'Brien and his special contributions to the art in the next chapter. Puppet animators often abandoned clay as a medium, as they often had to resculpt the pliant clay after each move. Fortunately, this limitation did not prevent other artists from refining this specialized art, much to the joy of audiences around the world. Art Clokey Art Clokey was a cinema student at the University of Southern California and a protégé of his professor Slavko Vorkapich. Vorkapich was famous for the refinement of the montage sequence in films where narrative is