Famous animator Eli Noyes, who was recognized for his revolutionary contributions to stop-motion animation using creative methods with sand and clay, has died at the age of 81.
Producer of Toy Story Guggenheim confirmed that Noyes passed away on Saturday at his San Francisco home from issues related to prostate cancer. To produce media for print, film, and other platforms, the two founded Alligator Planet in 2003.
The renowned Harvard Five architect Eliot Noyes and his wife, interior designer Molly Duncan Weed Noyes, welcomed Eli Noyes into the world on October 18, 1942, in Amherst, Massachusetts, as Eliot Fette Noyes Jr.
In 1965, while still an undergraduate at Harvard University, Noyes won an Oscar nomination for his eight-minute animated feature Clay or the Origin of Species, which popularized the genre of clay-stop animation.
After graduating from college, Noyes and Claudia Weil co-directed movies that were not animated. These included Aspen: 1970, which focused on an architect generational conflict, and This is Home of Mrs. Levant Graham, which followed the life of a black family in a Washington, D.C. slum flat.
After relocating to San Francisco with his family in 1991, Noyes worked on interactive projects at Pixar and collaborated with programmers from Disney Channel and Imagineers to create Zoog Disney, an afternoon kids’ programming block that fused TV and the internet.
Noyes directed animation for the Oscar-nominated documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Paper (2009) while working at his previously mentioned Alligator Planet.
Eli Noyes is survived by his granddaughter Esme, his wife Augusta, and his children Isaac and Abigail.
