Eli Noyes, a filmmaker whose use of clay and sand in stop-motion animation garnered an Oscar nomination and shaped the aesthetic of Nickelodeon and MTV during the early days of cable television, died on March 23 at his home in San Francisco. He was 81.
His wife, the artist Augusta Talbot, said the cause was prostate cancer.
Mr. Noyes made his first film, “Clay or the Origin of Species,” in 1965 as an undergraduate student at Harvard. To the accompaniment of a jazz quartet, clay model animals whimsically portray evolution in the movie, which lasts just under nine minutes.
Though stop-motion filmmaking had existed for decades and clay was used in the 1950s to create animated characters like Gumby, directors and cinephiles credited Mr. Noyes’s rookie effort with reviving interest in the technique at a time when hand-drawn characters were more popular.
The film was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated short subject.
“This recognition served as a tremendous boost to the credibility of clay as an animation medium, bulldozing a path for even greater works,” Rick Cooper, a former production manager for Will Vinton Productions, a Claymation film company, wrote in the journal Design for Arts in Education.
Peter Lord, a founder of Aardman Animations, the English studio that used clay in the production of the “Wallace and Gromit” films, “Chicken Run” and other popular animated features, recalled seeing “Clay or the Origin of Species” on British television when he was getting started as a filmmaker.
“If I hadn’t seen this film, I swear I would have never gotten started in stop-motion animation,” Mr. Lord said in an interview. “Seeing clay brought to life in that way was a true revelation. It’s really to do with the material. It is quite primitive, but full of life and invention.”
Mr. Noyes followed “Clay or the Origin of Species” with several animated and stop-motion films, including “Peanut Butter & Jelly,” a stop-motion short in which his brother, Fred, made a sandwich, and “Sandman,” a three-minute tale, set to bluegrass music, of a sandman going to bed.
In 1976, several of his films were shown during an event at the Greenwich Village art-house theater Film Forum. “Mr. Noyes is a filmmaker of impressive accomplishment, and his work deserves to be seen,” the New York Times film critic Richard Eder wrote in his review.
The next year, public television featured Mr. Noyes’s films in a three-part series.
“Essentially, Noyes’s works are expanded remarks, rhythmic and visual,” the Washington Post television critic Tom Shales wrote. “At their worst they are ingenuous and at their best they are ingenuous, too, which is certainly better than pretentious.”
Mr. Noyes drew even wider attention for his work on cable television in the 1970s and ’80s.
He used sand to make animated pinwheels for Nickelodeon’s first show, “Pinwheel,” which had a cast of both puppets and people. In 1983, he founded Noyes & Laybourne with Kit Laybourne, a television producer. The company made several hit shows for the network, including “Eureeka’s Castle.”
In 1988, the duo joined Colossal Pictures, an Emmy Award-winning entertainment company, and created the animation and graphics for MTV’s “Liquid Television,” the showcase for independent animators that introduced the characters Beavis and Butt-Head. They also made animated advertisements for HBO, IBM, Scholastic, ABC Sports, Reebok and Xerox.
“A growing interest and awareness of animation by ad agencies and the public as a whole has been developing,” Mr. Noyes told Backstage magazine in 1988. “Back in the early and mid-seventies, when I was involved with making experimental and animated films, I was considered odd.”
Eliot Fette Noyes Jr. was born on Oct. 18, 1942, in Alexandria, Va., and grew up in New Canaan, Conn. His father was a prominent industrial designer and architect whose designs included the IBM Selectric typewriter and round gas pumps for Mobil. His mother, Mary (Weed) Noyes, known as Molly, was an architect and interior designer.
Mr. Noyes received a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Harvard in 1964. He then enrolled in the college’s graduate program in architecture, but left after a year. “I think he realized that following in the footsteps of his father was an overwhelming idea,” his wife said in an interview.
He moved to California briefly before relocating to New York City to begin his career in the film industry. While working on his animated movies, he also made educational programs for children and directed or several documentaries with Claudia Weill, including “This Is the Home of Mrs. Levant Graham” (1970), about a poor Black family in Washington.
“As Noyes and Miss Weill understand it, her warm, happy, sloppy, incredibly overpopulated apartment is a kind of crowded paradise for movie making,” Roger Greenspun wrote in the Times. “A lot happens in front of their camera, and they know how to let it happen, and so for them a world comes alive.”
In 1991, Mr. Noyes and his family moved to San Francisco, where he worked on animation projects at Pixar and Disney Channel and was later the creative director at the Oxygen Network. In 2003, he founded a production company, Alligator Planet, with Ralph Guggenheim, one of the producers of “Toy Story” (1995).
Mr. Noyes continued to work on documentaries at Alligator Planet; his projects included animating scenes in “The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers” (2009) for which there was no archival footage. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary feature.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Noyes is survived by his children, Abigail and Isaac Noyes; his brother, Fred Noyes; two sisters, Mary Burst and Derry Craig; and a granddaughter.
Mr. Lord, whose animation studio created “Wallace and Gromit,” met Mr. Noyes at a film festival in San Francisco. The encounter was fittingly amusing, as Mr. Lord had confused him and his father, with whom he shared a name and who was long dead.
“I was giving a talk and as I always do I was crediting his film as a formative influence,” Mr. Lord said. “I said onstage that he had passed on and what a shame that was.”
Mr. Lord continued: “So after, this guy comes up and said, ‘I’m Eli Noyes, and I’m just fine.’ It was really great. Now I could thank him for his incredibly important influence on me.”
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