Travis Knight looks like a man coming back from combat. In reality, we are talking about numerous (fictional) battles, scripted, designed and meticulously staged and filmed over 16 years. On a scorching afternoon in Beverly Hills, the 53-year-old studio head and director arrived from London, where he had just finished post-production on Wildwoodwhich could safely be called his life’s work. “It’s been a part of my life for more than half my career,” Knight says. Wildwoodthe director and producer of. “So I’m going through a bit of a depression. It’s this thing that takes up so much of your time and your thoughts and your emotions – and when you’re done with it, you’re like, ‘What do I do with all this?'” He approaches it all from an unusual angle, both as a bottom-line-minded studio head – he’s run his independent animation company, Laika, for about 20 years – and as an artist resolutely bucking certain winds. opposites of the industry. He has not appeared for a long-term interview in years, mainly due to intensive requests from WildwoodThis represents 231 weeks of production. So, as we sit in a restaurant overlooking Los Angeles, we get to the part he’s least comfortable with: selling the thing. “I find myself basically acting all the time,” he says of his role as Laika’s figurehead. Before Los Angeles, he stopped in Telluride and Annecy, France, to Wildwood Promotional pop-ups; the film’s world premiere then brings it back to London. The film finally hits theaters on October 23.
Laika has made a name for itself with imaginative, handcrafted stop-motion features like Coraline And Kubo and the two strings (the latter being Knight’s directorial debut), produced for a fraction of what competitors like Pixar and Illumination spend on their films while still carving its way to strong box office returns and Oscar nominations. Knight will not disclose the budget of Wildwood but says it is Laika’s most expensive film to date. “We do more with less, and we always have,” he says. “We put more on screen than you think given the amount of money we put into these films.”
Adapted from Colin Meloy’s 2011 fantasy novel by Laika regular Chris Butler, the film follows Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee), a teenager living in Portland, Oregon, as she unwittingly ventures into an enchanted forest to rescue her kidnapped little brother.
What follows is a visually and dramatically spectacular adventure filled with strange creatures and timeless themes of family, heartbreak, and coming of age. The visceral complexity of the action alone seems unprecedented for stop-motion. The world was made up of 233 handmade puppets, covered with hundreds of thousands of replacement faces; 132 hands-on sets were constructed, featuring 728 miniature trees representing 10 species specific to the Pacific Northwest. The climactic battle sequence includes over 400 shots.
“You could tell this story like a live-action movie with some visual effects, you could do it hand-drawn, you could do it like a completely CG movie from start to finish,” Knight says. “But the fact that we did it the way we did it makes the movie what it is. You literally see someone squeeze the life out of something with their hands.”
Production began just over five years ago, with more than 1,000 people employed to bring Wildwood to life.
This time and effort resulted in resounding critical success — THRCritics have called it Laika’s masterpiece – with its commercial viability set to face a big test. After working with distribution partners such as Focus Features and United Artists, Laika has this time teamed up with Fathom, an events company, and is responsible for its own marketing. The tracker shows opening weekend revenue in the teens, a familiar range for Laika’s word-of-mouth successes.
“We’re an independent company, so it’s hard to take – and look, it’s a big experience. We might fall flat on our faces,” Knight says. He then laughs to himself. “It’s a bit terrifying.”
Knight is anti-AI —
but is Wildwood without AI? “As far as I know,” he said. “With these big visual effects houses, sometimes you don’t know what’s going on.”
Photographed by Dima Hohlov
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Knight’s father is iconic American businessman Phil Knight, founder of Nike. The business was just getting started since the young Knight grew up in Oregon, where he still resides. “Those early days of (Nike), it wasn’t easy and I didn’t know it,” he said. “I didn’t know all the struggles they were going through.” He describes himself as a “fucking weirdo” who grew up – without the language to situate himself. “We didn’t have the conditions that we have today for that – I mean, I was just a fucking weird kid,” he says. What terms are these? “‘Neurodivergence,’ which we didn’t have in the ’80s. I look back now, I’m like, ‘Well, sure.’ » I made friends slowly when I made them. I spent a lot of time in my own business and didn’t mind it.
His father encouraged him to play sports; he wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t having fun. His father would take him to business dinners and he would sit in the corner with a sketchbook. Even though he’s immersed in his own world, Knight knows he’s absorbed some of his sense of entrepreneurship.
Perhaps more relevant to his future: his parents were voracious readers and movie buffs. The first book his mother read to him was Lord of the Rings. (“I was basically in utero,” Knight jokes.) Knight thus felt encouraged to pursue his passion for drawing, which goes back as far as he can remember. He was obsessed with animated classics like those from 1981. Clash of the Titans and the work of Ray Harryhausen.
However, Knight could not imagine a career in this field. At first it veered off in a very different direction. Before he even became an adult, he signed a high-profile album deal under his hip-hop alter ego, Chilly Tee. Knight had developed a personal love of music as a child, only to be thrust into the spotlight as a teenager thanks in part to his father’s connections. Legendary producers The Bomb Squad (Public Enemy) agreed to support it after hearing a demo. In fact, Knight received several offers right off the bat. He moved to New York. He recorded the album. When he got out, he was unhappy, so he left music behind.
After graduating from Portland State University, Knight was hired as a production assistant at Will Vinton Studios, the groundbreaking Oregon-based stop-motion studio run by the eponymous, Academy Award-winning claymation pioneer. Phil Knight had invested in the company at that time — he has a long history of financially supporting Oregon businesses and institutions — and, according to Vinton, requested that his son be employed as part of the deal. Regardless, the young Knight immediately proved himself, ascending to the role of animator on projects like Eddie Murphy’s. Pajamas.
Vinton, who died in 2018, spoke openly about his struggles running a business and admitted before his death that his finances had gotten away from him. “It collapsed – it went bankrupt,” as Knight remembers the company. “I became more and more aware of it as we went along, and it was undeniable because at one point they cut off the power, they cut off the water, the company couldn’t pay the salaries. … Vinton Studios was an Oregon company that deserved to exist, and the world unfortunately disagreed.”
Phil Knight invested more and then took control and reshaped the company. Vinton resigned from the board and was fired days later.
The company was renamed Laika, after the dog sent into space by the Soviet Union in 1957. Vinton filed a lawsuit seeking $3.1 million, accusing Phil Knight of manipulating him into giving up control of his company in order to “hand over management…to his child, Travis Knight.” (The suit was dismissed.) In Marq Evans’ 2021 documentary Dream of clayseveral voices give credence to this allegation, notably the famous voice actor and performer Michele Mariana (Coraline, Wendell and Wild), who said: “They took the playdough, the name, they took everything. They didn’t need to do that.”
The Knights declined to participate in the documentary, and Travis says Vinton’s claims are flat-out inaccurate – but wouldn’t elaborate. “It’s not something I’m necessarily comfortable sharing publicly. I know exactly what his motivations were when all this happened, which is why I find some of the comments about the whole situation so upsetting – because they don’t even remotely reflect what happened,” he says. “The reality is the company went bankrupt, and if my father hadn’t decided to try to save this community, it would have been over. It would have been gone. It’s a simple fact.
“I don’t want to engage in anything that resembles defamation,” Knight continues. “I have immense empathy for Will.” It was Travis Knight’s idea to salvage what was left of Vinton to build a new, sustainable home for stop-motion animators at a time when the format was considered obsolete. He and his father “had a difficult conversation about it,” he said. “This community deserved to exist. It didn’t sit well with me, so I wanted to do everything I could to try to create a place where these people could still have a home. If (my father) hadn’t agreed to this crazy fucking project… God knows where my life would have taken me.”
Knight had never run a business before, nor had he directed any films himself. “I was absolutely terrified…
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