Gumbasia facts for kids

Gumbasia is a very short movie made in 1953 by Art Clokey. It was a special kind of film called clay animation. In clay animation, characters and objects are made from clay and moved slightly between each photo taken. When the photos are played quickly, it looks like the clay is moving all by itself! Art Clokey later became very famous for his TV shows Gumby and Davey and Goliath, which also used this cool clay animation style.

What is Gumbasia?

Gumbasia was Art Clokey's very first clay animation movie. It was super short, only 3 minutes and 45 seconds long! In the movie, you would see colorful lumps of clay moving and changing shapes to music. It was a bit like Walt Disney's famous movie Fantasia, which also showed animation set to classical music.

How Gumbasia Was Made

Art Clokey made Gumbasia while he was a student at the University of Southern California. He was learning from a teacher named Slavko Vorkapich. Vorkapich taught a special way of making movies called "Kinesthetic Film Principles." This style uses lots of interesting camera movements and a technique called stop-motion editing. Stop-motion is how clay animation works: you take one picture, move the clay a tiny bit, take another picture, and so on. This special style that Clokey learned from Vorkapich was later used in many of the Gumby movies you might know!

The Big Impact of a Small Film

Even though Gumbasia was very short, it had a huge impact! A movie producer named Sam Engel saw Gumbasia and was really impressed. He decided to give Art Clokey money to make a longer film. This new film was 15 minutes long and became the very first Gumby movie ever, called Gumby Goes to the Moon. So, this little clay movie from 1953 helped start the amazing adventures of Gumby!

Images for kids

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  A robot, symbolizing creativity and animation.