Bob Gardiner (animator)

James Robbins "Bob" Gardiner (March 19, 1951 – April 21, 2005) was a multi-talented artist, painter, cartoonist, animator, holographer, musician, storyteller and comedy writer, who invented the stop-motion 3-D clay animation technique that Will Vinton would later market as Claymation. Bob preferred the term Sculptimation for his frame-by-frame method of sculpting plasticine clay characters and sets. Gardiner and Vinton won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 1975 for Closed Mondays (1974).