While studying architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, Mr. Vinton often used modeling clay in his designs and, inevitably, to sculpt more irregular and irreverent designs with his buddies in his dorm room.

“Sometimes we made some pretty obscene things out of it,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1987, “but no matter what we did, the clay always came to life.”

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After college, Mr. Vinton worked in advertising, then moved to Portland and “started experimenting in my basement with clay animation.”

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The painstaking style requires hundreds of changes in the clay figures — which are photographed and spliced together — to create an animated “stop-motion” film. The use of clay figures in film dates at least to the 1930s; the animated character of Gumby was created as a stop-motion clay figure in the 1950s.

“Clay is a natural material for animation,” Mr. Vinton said in 1992. “Clay characters can show a wide range of emotions, and they’re able to transform easily from one shape to another.”

With Bob Gardiner, Mr. Vinton made a seven-minute animated film, “Closed Mondays,” in 1974, about the hallucinatory visions of a drunken man who wanders into an art museum at night. Everything in the film, from the museum walls to the artworks, the central character and the fantasy scenes, was made of clay. “Closed Mondays” won an Oscar for best animated short film.

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“Things that we now take for granted with computer graphics, he was doing it with clay 30 years ago,” film historian Jerry Beck told the Oregonian newspaper in 2005.

Mr. Vinton set up a studio in Portland and copyrighted the name Claymation to describe his art form. In 1985, he released a full-length animated feature film, “The Adventures of Mark Twain,” which did poorly in theaters, and he found little success until the California Raisin Advisory Board decided to launch a new advertising campaign.

An advertising agency came up with the idea of having animated raisins dance to a version of the Motown hit “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and hired Mr. Vinton to create the commercials. He and the artists in his studio designed more 25 clay raisins — no two of which looked exactly alike — and spent months animating the first commercial, which aired in 1986. The raisins marched out of a box, singing and dancing in unison along a tabletop like a miniaturized soul group from the ’60s. Other snack foods fainted and collapsed, unable to match the raisins’ slick moves and ineffable sense of cool.

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Mr. Vinton created a series of commercials featuring the California Raisins. The figures, about eight inches high, were sculpted over a wire frame. A 30-second commercial contained 24 frames per second, which meant that 720 individual scenes had to be meticulously set up by hand. Each commercial took about five weeks to complete.

The work paid off for California’s raisin growers, who saw their sales increase by 20 percent. Various brand-name cereals climbed on the bandwagon with Claymation commercials of their own, and the California Raisins became a certified cultural sensation.

“A good character is something great to behold,” Mr. Vinton told The Washington Post in 1999. “The proof ultimately is how cool it is, whether there’s buzz around the water cooler.”

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There was also a buzz around Mr. Vinton. He made commercials for M&M’s and other products and did Claymation sequences for music videos and the “Moonlighting” television show, with Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd. A memorable scene in the 1988 Michael Jackson film “Moonwalker” featured Mr. Vinton’s animated figures. The California Raisins were featured in a Saturday morning cartoon, merchandise and TV specials.

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Several music stars, including Ray Charles and Jackson, lent their images to California Raisins commercials, some of which were shown only in movie theaters.

“Michael called up and I’m sitting there, having small talk with Michael on the phone,” Mr. Vinton told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2009. “And I’m going, ‘What is this about? Why am I having this conversation?’ I realized he was talking about the California Raisins.

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“I said, ‘Michael, we should make you a raisin!’ I realized he was heading that way, anyway. And as soon as I said it, he said, ‘Yeah!’ ”

Mr. Vinton had designs on producing major films and on challenging Hollywood animation powerhouses, such as Pixar. His company expanded into computer animation and at its peak in the 1990s employed more than 400 people. Other animation companies, often started by his proteges, sprang up in Portland.

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Admitting that he was an artist with little business acumen, Mr. Vinton hired professional managers, but his company was doomed by a downturn in advertising and changing tastes.

Facing possible bankruptcy, Mr. Vinton sold a majority stake in Will Vinton Studios to Nike co-founder Phil Knight in 2002. Knight later changed the name of the studio to Laika, which is best known for producing the 2009 animated film “Coraline.”

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After a legal battle, Mr. Vinton was forced out of the company he founded in 2003 and was laid off without severance pay.

William Gale Vinton was born Nov. 17, 1947, in McMinnville, Ore. His father was a car dealer, his mother a bookkeeper.

At Berkeley, from which he graduated in 1971, Mr. Vinton sought to emulate the sinuous designs of Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi with his modeling clay, but he never became a practicing architect.

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“The filmmaking and the clay crossed paths early in my career,” Mr. Vinton told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2001. “While I was still in college I did short films just for the fun of it. I’d sculpt things, have a beer in one hand and a character in another. It was just like entertainment.”

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He teamed with comedian Eddie Murphy to produce the stop-motion animated television series “The PJs,” which aired from 1999 to 2001, with characters made from latex foam. Mr. Vinton produced another short-lived animated series, “Gary & Mike,” in 2001.

In addition to his 1975 Academy Award, Mr. Vinton was nominated three other times for best animated short film and once for best visual effects.

He won Emmy Awards for the holiday specials “A Claymation Christmas Celebration” (1987) and “A Claymation Easter” (1992).

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His marriages to Bevan McEachern and Susan Shadburne, ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife, the former Gillian Allred of Portland; three children from his second marriage; and two sisters.

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After he lost his company, Mr. Vinton remained a revered creative figure to other animators. He returned to low-budget filmmaking, taught at the Art Institute of Portland and seemed content with the legacy he molded.

“There is a point in Claymation,” he told People magazine in 1987, “where you can almost fool yourself into thinking that these things are manipulating themselves — that they’re alive.”

An earlier version of this story omitted the name of Mr. Vinton’s first wife, Bevan McEachern.