Travis Knight, the Laika director caught between He-Man and handmade puppets

Travis Knight

Photo: Thierry Sollerot from Vernon (Eure, Hte Normandie), FRANCE / CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 13, 1973 Hillsboro, Oregon, United States
Occupation	Film director and animator
Known for	Kubo and the Two Strings, Bumblebee, Masters of the Universe
Awards	BAFTA · Golden Globe · Annie · Visual Effects Society (shared)

Few directors have worked both sides of the line that Travis Knight straddled this year. For Amazon and Mattel he made Masters of the Universe, a live-action He-Man built for the summer crowd. For Laika, the Oregon stop-motion studio he has run for most of his adult life, he made Wildwood, a puppet epic about a girl who walks into a forbidden forest to take her baby brother back from the crows. The blockbuster sank at the box office. The puppet film drew the best reviews of his career and a modest audience. Which of the two films tells you who Travis Knight is remains the question his career keeps putting to him.

The easy answer starts with the surname. Knight is the son of Phil Knight, the co-founder of Nike, and Laika exists because his father’s money bought and then reshaped another man’s studio. The harder answer is that he has spent most of his working life at an animator’s bench, nudging puppets a fraction of a millimetre at a time, and the films he signs carry the habits of someone who learned the craft before he learned to run a company.

He was born on September 13, 1973, in Hillsboro, a suburb of Portland, went to Jesuit High School near Beaverton and graduated from Portland State University. His first ambition was music. Recording as Chilly Tee, he cut a demo in a studio built inside the family home, and it travelled far enough that Hank Shocklee, whose Bomb Squad production team shaped the sound of Public Enemy, agreed to make his album. Get Off Mine came out in 1993 and went nowhere. Knight has said he disliked performing; Shocklee still defends the record and blames its fate on a debut that arrived out of nowhere in a genre that runs on momentum.

Animation came through a door his father opened. In 1998 Phil Knight invested in Will Vinton Studios, the Portland company whose founder had coined the word Claymation, and the arrangement brought Travis in as an intern. He animated on television work such as The PJs and learned the trade on commercials. By 2003 his father controlled the company and Travis, with no management experience, sat on its board. Vinton was forced out, and in 2005 the studio was relaunched as Laika.

Inside Laika he became the lead animator, the person on the studio floor rather than in the corner office. He animated on Coraline, Henry Selick’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman, and was lead animator and producer on ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls. His character animation on ParaNorman won an Annie Award, and The Boxtrolls brought him his first Oscar nomination for best animated feature, shared with its directors, Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable. Every Laika feature of that period was nominated for that Oscar. None won.

He finally directed with Kubo and the Two Strings, a samurai fable that the Laika artist Shannon Tindle pitched to him: a one-eyed boy who tells stories with folded paper and a shamisen and is hunted by his own grandfather, the Moon King. It won the BAFTA for best animated film, earned Knight a second Oscar nomination alongside the producer Arianne Sutner, and became one of the very few animated features also nominated for visual effects. In theatres it struggled, a pattern Laika knows well.

Paramount then handed him Bumblebee, his first live-action film and the first entry in the Transformers series not directed by Michael Bay. Knight, who grew up with the original toy line, set it in the eighties and turned a robot spin-off into something closer to a coming-of-age story; many reviewers called it the best film the franchise had produced. Back at Laika he produced Missing Link, which won the Golden Globe for best animated feature, gave him a third Oscar nomination and still did badly at the box office.

The criticism that follows Knight is rarely about his films. It is about how Laika came to exist. The documentary Claydream tells the story of Will Vinton losing his company to the Knights, and several reviewers came away describing Laika as built on what Vinton had made; Travis and his father appear only in archive and deposition footage, having not taken part. The Nike link runs the other way too. Knight has sat on Nike’s board since 2015, and the company’s filings say he was chosen because of his role in managing the Class A stock held by the family’s holding company, Swoosh. A studio that can absorb a run of money-losing films is a studio with a patron. Laika’s independence is real precisely because it is underwritten.

That tension sharpened this year. Masters of the Universe, with Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Adam and Jared Leto as Skeletor, opened on June 5 in second place behind the new Scary Movie, with about $29 million in North America against a reported budget of at least $170 million, and finished near $113 million worldwide. Knight later told The Hollywood Reporter that the film’s life on streaming mattered more to Amazon than its run in cinemas, and that it deserved a better fate than it got.

Wildwood was the opposite bet. Adapted by Chris Butler from the novel by Colin Meloy, frontman of The Decemberists, and the illustrator Carson Ellis, it is Laika’s first film rated PG-13, and it reached American theatres on October 23 through Fathom Entertainment rather than a major studio, after premiering at the BFI London Film Festival and winning the audience award at Sitges. Knight has argued in interviews that studios rarely respect young audiences, and he made a fairy tale that frightens children on purpose. The reviews were close to unanimous. The opening, roughly $12 million and third place in North America, was not the same kind of verdict.

Knight lives in Oregon with his wife and children and sits on the board of trustees of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. His announced slate points back to the workshop: Laika has named him director of The Night Gardener, a neo-noir written by Bill Dubuque, co-creator of Ozark, and of an adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi. Neither has a release date. He has said he would happily return to Eternia if Amazon wants a sequel, but the safer bet is that his next film will be made a frame at a time in Hillsboro, a few miles from where he was born.

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