Travis Knight

If you look at films like the Rankin/Bass specials, those sorts of things, there's nothing inherently creepy about any of those, in fact those are fairly warm.

I think any artist wants their artist to be seen and appreciated and enjoyed by as many people as possible.

I'm a huge fan of what Marvel did, it's no surprise for anyone to know that as a child I was a huge fan of comics.

At LAIKA, we try to find an artful balance of darkness and light, intensity and warmth, and humor and heart. The idea of being able to bring that philosophy to 'Bumblebee' was really exciting.

One of the other things that I love about Miyazaki's films, is that when he sets a film in Europe, it's not a documentary - it doesn't really look like Europe, but it's something he internalises, synthesises and weaves into his work. I love seeing that cross-cultural exchange.

I just love what art can do and what it means for us; that it can cross barriers. It can speak to us across space and time and culture.

I love 'Spirited Away,' that's a huge one.

I love 'Princess Mononoke,' 'My Neighbour Totoro.'

Coming from the world of animation, every single line counts; every single gesture counts. You put thought into every single one of those things and the way a frame is composed.

It took me five years to make 'Kubo and the Two Strings.'

Stop-motion is filmmaking at the pace of a glacier. In live action, you're moving so quickly.

If you look at 'Coraline' and you look at 'ParaNorman' certainly you can tell that there are threads of the same DNA between those two movies, but they're two very different kinds of movies. They look different, they feel different, they are very different kinds of movies.

Stop-motion has limitations, any form of filmmaking does, but stop-motion has a lot of limitations.

When you look back over 100 years when stop-motion was really at the dawn of cinema, a lot of the ways it developed was you had stage magicians who were looking to bring their illusions to life, and one of the ways they did that, at the time, was through cinema and stop-motion. They developed these processes.

We're constantly trying to find the best way to tell the stories that we want.

We used to go to movies to see stories about ourselves. It would transport us to new worlds and we'd see aspects of ourselves reflected back.

I take a firm stand against sequels. My industry brethren are a little shocked at how firmly I'm committed to not doing sequels.

Ultimately, the goal is to be on an annual cycle - releasing a film every year.

You only have so much time on this planet.

When we started on 'Coraline,' there was a whole host of things that we had no idea how we were going to do. Because we were making films in a way that had never really been done before, we were taking this hundred-year-old art form and bringing it into a new era by embracing technology and innovation.

The water in 'Life of Pi' is very realistic.

Our ambition is to be the center of independent animation filmmaking; to be the bravest animation studio in the world.

A principal struggle of many young companies is to establish an identity, a philosophical and emotional core, and LAIKA is no exception.

Artists are neurotic and hypersensitive, and they tend to focus on granular details, sometimes at the expense of the big picture. I've gotten better at the big picture over the years.

Historically, there's been a degree of sameness to animated films.

We want to tell unique, individual, discrete stories with a unique and discrete individual point of view.

In some ways we describe 'Boxtrolls' as 'Oliver Twist' if Terry Gilliam had made it. I think he's an extraordinary artist, and animator.

I loved Tolkien and I loved 'Star Wars,' which was the first memory that I have being in a movie theater. And, of course, that was the defining movie for me as a kid.

I always loved that solitary experience of making things. There's a solitary aspect to animating... It's ultimately the animator and the puppet coaxing a performance out of it.

I spent a lot of time alone when I was a kid, I climbed trees, hopped creek beds, read, watched movies, I'd make stories, make films.

The only kind of people who pursue stop-motion as a career are people who are absolutely in love with the medium.

The interesting thing about Laika is that it's very much an island of misfit toys. It's unusual people with strange talents and very unusual passions who have somehow found each other.

The film industry is run by multinational media conglomerates and they have their perspective on what they need from their product. That's why we live in an era where you see reboots and sequels and remakes and prequels, all these old presents are re-wrapped and offered up as new gifts.

Just because somebody works in miniature does not diminish or invalidate their contributions to the art form compared to someone who works in live action.

It's a very difficult thing to adapt a piece of existing material into film.

If you can connect with the audience emotionally, that's potent storytelling.

You see it in the stuff I've done at Laika: I've always tried to make movies that have an artful blend of darkness and light, intensity and warmth. That have a thinking brain and a strong beating heart at the centre of it.

Sometimes the theme of the film is something that comes down to the way you designed the film - that you're saying something about the world. And it's one of the things that I think animation can do, in a way that other forms of filmmaking can't do. Because every single thing you see has got to be designed and created.

All of the things we learned on 'Coraline' we applied to 'ParaNorman,' and all of the things we learned on 'ParaNorman' and 'Coraline' we applied to 'The Boxtrolls.'

Works of art are like a Trojan horse. Under the surface is always some artist's deeply held philosophy on their view of the world. But on the other hand, you do not want to make it feel like medicine. You do not want to make it feel like an afternoon TV special where you're trying to hammer a message into someone's head.

I think there's an unfortunate thing where a lot of content geared towards kids and families is watered down, dumbed down.

When you think of the warm grandmotherly type of character, you don't think of Elaine Stritch.

Animation has been ghettoized through the years by giving the impression we only do the same kind of stories.

Very few people view stop motion the way we do. We really try to use it - and animation generally - as a powerful visual medium by which you can tell virtually any kind of story in any genre.

We had so many firsts on 'Coraline' that I couldn't quite see where we'd go from there, but for 'ParaNorman' we developed this 'skewed naturalism' that marries a lot of intricate detail with a more cinematic approach, then just built on all that and pushed those techniques even further, so we can tell our stories that much more effectively.

We're not purists about stop-motion. If there's a tool we can use that makes more sense to bring something to life in a better way, we'll use it, whether that's hand-drawn animation or CG or some newfangled technology we're developing.

One of the things that gives stop-motion its inherent magic is that you're seeing something imperfect and thus undeniably human - because it's made by human hands.

We live in world that wants to burnish the rough edges and straighten the crooked line, but conformity doesn't beget greatness.

We use technology in service of the art, as a storytelling tool - and if we want to do something that's never been done we have to invent the technology. 'ParaNorman' represents the realization of stop-motion's potential.

When you allow an animator to focus on a portion of the film and really understand the arc of the scene, what's happening with the characters, they can make choices all along the way that reinforce the main points of the scene. They really get to know what's happening.