Travis Knight

One of the things my dad told me when I was growing up was, 'Find your calling. Find what you're meant to do.' When I found animation, I knew this was it.

When your focus is franchises and brands, that limits the kinds of stories you can tell. That kind of thing can be good for the bottom line but they're not particularly good for showcasing the diversity of human experience.

We respect that children are smart, sophisticated and can handle things that adults typically don't think they can.

There is an inherent creative restlessness at Laika where we always want to challenge ourselves.

Within a safe environment, the theater, you can have a big ride, big ups and downs, intensity, warmth, humanity, laughs, tears - you want that full range of emotion.

I won't say which one, but one shot on 'Kubo' took two months to get the expression right. It's ridiculous on some level.

I know I have exacting standards.

I'm a child of the '80s.

We made a commitment to making diverse stories with diverse characters brought to life by diverse artists.

I fully believe that representation and inclusion matters... and that's why on all of our films, we've featured diverse casts, and that actually is true for 'Kubo' as well.

I think the Knight boys have a long history of disappointing their fathers.

My grandfather, my dad's dad, he was a lawyer. He was a state legislator. He was the publisher of Oregon's second largest newspaper. He was a pretty amazing guy.

If any single human being is responsible for all this nonsense I've done with my life, it's Ray Harryhausen... In 'Kubo,' you can see some of his influence throughout.

If you go back and look at those films, movies like 'Bambi' and 'Pinocchio,' there are elements that are incredibly dark. Yet no one batted an eye, thinking that kind of entertainment was inappropriate for children.

I made friends slowly when I made them at all.

When I became a father, I saw what passed for family entertainment. So much of it was vapid. I wanted to make things that mattered.

My brother and I had unresolved things. I just wish I could have had one final conversation with him.

You have to find the thing you feel you can contribute to the world.

Nike is like a member of the family. Undoubtedly some of that stuff is in my DNA.

My kids have terrible taste.

One of the great many things I love about being a father is sharing my beloved childhood experiences with my kids.

When 'Buffy' was on the air, I recorded every single episode on my TiVo. I'm pretty sure my DVR thought I was a fourteen year-old girl. Whatever. The show was incredible. It refused to be pigeonholed.

No TV show has meant more to me than 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'

A fundamental and unfortunate part of being alive is to suffer loss and to suffer grief.

Rather than a taste for the macabre, I like the full range of human emotion in a story, which means darkness and light. It means warmth, but it also potentially means scares.

From all the iterations, Bumblebee has been the Transformer with the most connection to people.

Historically, for a stop-motion film, you gathered the crew together, you made the movie, and then everyone ran screaming to the next project.

I love Oregon and want to see the state continue to thrive and evolve.

Portland and Oregon draw a certain kind of person to it. The city has extraordinarily talented people and sometimes it takes an outsider to see that.

You throw a rock in Hollywood and you're going to hit someone in the film industry.

Portland doesn't have the same kind of infrastructure that the national film hubs have. We struggle with that a little bit.

The executive side of you always wants to find the best, most efficient way to do things. Of course, art is extraordinarily inefficient.

Creativity is messy and inefficient. But corporate governance needs to be tight and organized.

Phil is my father. He's a part of who I am. But I don't want to be defined by that.

My father has this insane, all-consuming passion for sports.

Stop-motion is sort of the redheaded stepchild of animation. But it's incredibly beautiful.

You can never tell what's going to be popular.

Laika's films aim to promote thought, feeling, and connectivity through art, inspired by our shared humanity. We're deeply gratified that the spirit of our work has resonated so strongly with audiences around the world.

In any piece of art, the artist pours themselves into it. It becomes a reflection of who they are and what they believe. That's what it has to be. Otherwise it's just a product.

Everything I've tried to do at Laika, searching for an artful blend of darkness and light, intensity and warmth, humour and heart, I wanted to bring to the Transformers franchise.

This medium of stop-motion, it can be much more than it's been kind of defined as - it's not just a creaky and anachronistic way of making films, it actually is a very vital art form that can do wonderful things if put in the right hands.

We don't want to make little pop culture ephemera or confections, that sort of thing, and so 'ParaNorman' like 'Coraline' has something meaningful to say.

I think anytime you see something that's been brought to life by an artist's hands, it just has a different kind of quality.

Let's be honest, working in stop motion is awful. It's the worst. It's such a stupid way to make a movie. It's ridiculous. You're literally playing around with these dolls that are maybe 9 inches tall, trying to coax a performance out of it.

Commingling keenly felt emotion, madcap humor, and retina-bursting visuals, 'Missing Link' is a kaleidoscopic cinematic experience unlike any other.

If you go too small, you can't get the performance you need out of the small little parts. And if you go too big, the puppet gets difficult to move, because it's too heavy, and there's too much material, and it becomes this exercise in just moving these massive parts around. So there is a natural scale that makes sense for stop-motion.

While you're testing out armatures of puppets, you're also trying to find the proper visual vocabulary for the character and to come up with a guidebook of sorts for how a character will move and act.

I was athletic growing up and that was, of course, a big part of my household, but it wasn't something that I was necessarily passionate about.

Historically, stop-motion animation has had a jerky-jerky quality, which is a constant reminder to audiences that they're looking at artificial objects. It creates a barrier between the audience having an emotional experience and what they're looking at. We're working hard to get past that.

People have been declaring stop-motion dead for a generation. But living in the digital age, people appreciate the art of craft, or working with your hands.