‘Wildwood’ Director Travis Knight on Spending 16 Years to Create His Stop-Motion “Masterpiece”

Travis Knight looks like a man who has returned from battle. In reality, we’re talking many (fictional) battles, scripted and designed and meticulously staged and shot over 16 years. On a scalding afternoon in Beverly Hills, the 53-year-old studio chief and director has flown in from London, where he’s just completed postproduction on Wildwood, which could safely be called his life’s work. “It’s been a part of my life for more than half my career,” says Knight, Wildwood‘s director and producer. “So I’m going through a little bit of a depression. It’s this thing that occupies so much of your time and your thoughts and your emotions — and when you’re done with it, it’s like, ‘What do I do with all this?’ ” He comes at all of this from an unusual angle, as both a bottom-line-minded studio chief — he’s been running his independent animation company, Laika, for about 20 years — and an artist standing in defiant opposition to certain industry headwinds. He hasn’t sat for a longform interview in years, mainly because of the intensive demands of Wildwood‘s 231 weeks of production. And so, as we settle into a restaurant overlooking L.A., we’re arriving at the part he’s less comfortable with — selling the thing. “I find myself essentially performing all the time,” he says of his role as Laika figurehead. Before L.A., he stopped in Telluride and Annecy, France, for Wildwood promotional pop-ups; the film’s world premiere then brought him back to London. The movie at last hits theaters Oct. 23. 

Laika made its name with imaginative, handcrafted stop-motion features like Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings (the latter of which was Knight’s directorial debut), produced for a fraction of what competitors like Pixar and Illumination spend on their movies while still muscling their way to strong box office returns and Oscar nominations. Knight will not disclose the budget for Wildwood but says it is Laika’s most expensive film yet. “We do more with less, and we always have,” he says. “We put more onscreen than you would think for the amount of dollars that we invest in these movies.”

Adapted from Colin Meloy’s 2011 fantasy novel by Laika regular Chris Butler, the film follows Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee), a teen living in Portland, Oregon, as she unwittingly ventures into an enchanted forest to rescue her abducted baby brother.

What follows is a visually and dramatically spectacular adventure filled with strange creatures and timeless themes relating to family, grief and coming of age. The visceral intricacy of the action alone feels unprecedented for stop-motion. The world was composed of 233 handmade puppets, overlaid with hundreds of thousands of replacement faces; 132 practical sets were built, which included 728 miniature trees representing 10 species specific to the Pacific Northwest. The climactic battle sequence features more than 400 shots.

“You could tell this story as a live-action movie with some visual effects, you could do it hand-drawn, you could do it as an entirely CG movie beginning to end,” says Knight. “But the fact that we made it the way we made it makes the movie what it is. You are literally seeing somebody coaxing life out of something with their hands.”

Production began a little over five years ago, with more than 1,000 people employed in bringing Wildwood to life.

That time and effort has resulted in a rousing critical success — THR‘s review called it Laika’s masterpiece — with its commercial viability set to face a big test. Having worked with distribution partners like Focus Features and United Artists, this time around, Laika has teamed with the event-oriented Fathom and is responsible for its own marketing. Tracking shows opening-weekend grosses in the teens, a familiar range for Laika’s word-of-mouth hits. 

“We are an independent company, so it’s a lot to bear — and look, it’s a grand experiment. We might fall flat on our face,” Knight says. He then laughs to himself. “It’s slightly terrifying.”

***

Knight’s father is the iconic American businessman Phil Knight, founder of Nike. The company was just getting off the ground as the younger Knight was raised in Oregon, where he still resides. “Those early days of [Nike], it was not easygoing, and I didn’t know,” he says. “I did not know all the struggles they were going through.” He describes himself as a “fucking weirdo” growing up — without the language to situate himself. “We didn’t have the terms that we have now for that — I mean, I was just a fucking weird kid,” he says. What terms might those be? ” ‘Neurodivergence,’ which we did not have in the ’80s. I look back now, I’m like, ‘Well, of course.’ I made friends slowly when I made them at all. I spent a lot of time in my own company, and I didn’t mind it.” 

His dad encouraged him to play sports; he wasn’t bad, but he didn’t enjoy himself. His dad would drag him along to business dinners, and he’d sit in the corner with a sketchbook. Even while immersed in his own world, Knight knows he absorbed some of that entrepreneurial acumen. 

Perhaps more relevant to his future: His parents were voracious readers and cinephiles. The first book his mother read to him was The Lord of the Rings. (“I was essentially in utero,” Knight quips.) Knight thus felt encouragement to pursue his passion for drawing, which goes back as far as his memories do. He was obsessed with animated classics like 1981’s Clash of the Titans and Ray Harryhausen’s oeuvre.

Knight couldn’t conceive of a career in the field, though. Initially, he swerved in a wildly different direction. Before even becoming a legal adult, he signed a high-profile album deal under his hip-hop alter ego, Chilly Tee. Knight had developed a private love of music as a child, only to be thrust into the spotlight in adolescence thanks in part to his dad’s connections. Legendary producers The Bomb Squad (Public Enemy) agreed to back him after hearing a demo. In fact, Knight received several offers out of the gate. He moved to New York. He recorded the album. Upon its release, he was miserable, so he left music behind.

After graduating from Portland State University, Knight was hired as a production assistant at Will Vinton Studios, the groundbreaking stop-motion studio based in Oregon and run by the eponymous Oscar-winning claymation pioneer. Phil Knight had invested in the company right around that time — he has a long history of financially supporting Oregon businesses and institutions — and, according to Vinton, had asked that his son be employed as part of the deal. Regardless, the younger Knight instantly proved himself, rising to the role of animator on projects like Eddie Murphy’s The PJs. 

Vinton, who died in 2018, was open about his struggles in running a business and acknowledged before his death that its finances had slipped beyond his grasp. “It collapsed — it went bankrupt,” as Knight remembers of the company. “I became more aware of that as we progressed, and then it was undeniable because at some point, they shut the electricity off, they shut the water off, the company couldn’t make payroll. … Vinton Studios was an Oregon company that deserved to be in existence, and the world didn’t agree, unfortunately.” 

Phil Knight invested more to then take control of and reshape the company. Vinton resigned from the board and was fired mere days later.

The company was remade as Laika, named after the dog sent to outer 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 Claydream, several voices give credence to that allegation, including noted voice actor and performer Michele Mariana (Coraline, Wendell & Wild), who said, “They took claymation, the name — they took everything. They didn’t need to do that.”

The Knights declined to participate in the documentary, and Travis argues Vinton’s claims are flatly inaccurate — while stopping short of saying more. “It’s not something I’m necessarily comfortable sharing publicly. I know exactly what his motivations were when all that happened, which is why I find some of the commentary around the whole situation so upsetting — because it’s not even remotely a reflection of what happened,” he says. “The reality is, the company went under, and but for the fact that my father decided to try to save this community, that would’ve been it. It would’ve been gone. That is the simple fact. 

“I don’t want to get engaged in anything that’s resembling character assassination,” Knight continues. “I have tremendous empathy for Will.” It was Travis Knight’s idea to salvage what remained of Vinton to build a new and sustainable home for stop-motion animators at a time when the format was considered outdated. He and his father “had a hard conversation about it,” he says. “This community deserved to exist. It didn’t sit well with me, so I wanted to do whatever I could to try to make a place where these people could still have a home. Had [my father] not gone along with this fucking harebrain scheme … God knows where my life would’ve taken me.”

Knight hadn’t led a company before, nor had he made any movies himself. “I was absolutely terrified essentially all the time,” he says. “But to my benefit, I was able to talk to my father about all this stuff. He’d been through every possible scenario one could imagine in his years of running Nike. I had access to such an extraordinary mind.” Those early years brought him closer to his dad than he’d felt his whole life.

“He’s a child of the Depression. Men of that generation are generally not the most open of humans — one might say ’emotionally constipated’ — so being able to approach that relationship from a different angle was a gift,” Knight says.

As to the nepo baby claims around Knight’s ascent? “That stuff has to run off you — people have said many, many worse things about me than that,” he says. “When I see people try to diminish other people’s humanity by any kind of label, I find that sad. They can call me whatever they want to call it, and from a certain definition it’s true. But that has no impact on me or what I do. I do something that I deeply love and deeply care about.”

***

From an outsider’s perspective, Laika’s run has been remarkable from the jump. The new company’s first film was the Gothic fantasy Coraline, helmed by stop-motion icon Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas) — a classic that’s endured to the extent that a 2024 rerelease grossed north of $50 million globally. And yet, it was a major gamble for the new studio. “Nobody was interested in this movie,” Knight says. “I remember we packed up our little clown car and went down to L.A. to try to shop it. We heard: ‘Nobody wants to see a stop-motion film.’ “ 

So they mounted it on their own. (Focus came aboard as a distributor once production was underway.) Initially a modest success, Coraline grew and grew — a darker, weirder big-screen animated offering than anything else out there. It resonated as a boldly mature kids film and is now the backbone of a years-long campaign to build general awareness for Laika ahead of Wildwood‘s release. “We’ve introduced Laika films to new audiences, which is absolutely essential,” says David Burke, the studio’s chief marketing and operations officer.

Knight was lead animator on Coraline — then made a name for himself as a director with 2016’s Kubo and the Two Strings, which received rave reviews, critical awards and an Oscar nomination for best animated feature. From there, Knight continued to run Laika while also breaking out as an in-demand live-action director. He helmed the well-regarded Transformers spinoff, Bumblebee (2018), which grossed more than four times its budget. Suddenly, he was red-hot in a new arena. 

“A lot of people were going after him,” says Oscar-nominated producer Todd Black, known for Fences and Highest 2 Lowest. “But he’s very picky and he does his own thing. He’s a very, very selective guy.” 

Black was able to recruit Knight, however, for a property he and his partner Jason Blumenthal had owned the rights to for more than a decade: Masters of the Universe, working off Mattel’s He-Man franchise. Like Transformers, it brought Knight back to his often-solitary childhood. “These things were in my life at a time where I was pouring my imagination into these physical things that I loved,” he says.

Here he had the chance to do so on a massive scale — a budget of $170 million, backed by Amazon MGM Studios.

Despite a wide theatrical release in May, the film underperformed at the box office, grossing just $113 million worldwide — only to then surge with its streaming launch on Prime Video, generating more than 1 billion minutes viewed during its first week on the platform.

The feeling for Knight was bittersweet. He made a theatrical movie and felt it did not get the fairest shake in that regard.

“Its life on streaming was much more important to Amazon than its life in the theaters,” Knight says. “It’s not something I understood going into it. I wanted their faith in us as filmmakers and in the movie to be rewarded in a way that wasn’t to my hopes and expectations. The film deserved a better fate than it got, but I’ve made peace with it.” (Amazon insiders say the company looks at the complementary value of theatrical and streaming when greenlighting a project.)

***

You may be wondering: How did Knight helm two huge undertakings, hitting theaters within a few months of each other? As tired as Knight may feel now, downing his coffee in a rueful celebration of Wildwood‘s completion, it’s nothing compared to what the past few years looked like. He really directed both films at once. 

He oversaw Masters in London, working roughly 9 to 5. He’d wrap the day before logging on, as Laika’s Portland headquarters were just waking up, to get back into work on the movie he’d been working on in some capacity for more than a decade. “He actually made it easy because he was so clear,” says Black. “I’ve been doing this 41 years. I’ve never seen anybody work harder but always cool as a cucumber.” Adds Burke, Knight’s right hand at Laika: “He would spend the next several hours reviewing dailies, talking directly with animators, being really and truly across the entire process. It was remarkable.”

While Masters‘ marketing was left in the hands of another studio, Knight expresses a determination to control every inch of Wildwood‘s rollout. Laika had real momentum to build into something bigger, he says, before COVID shut things down at a crucial moment — delaying Wildwood and thus creating another make-or-break moment for the studio. (Its most recent release, Missing Link, came out way back in 2019.) Wildwood is an ideally scrappy representative for the quirky underdog that is Laika, surrounded as it is by merger-enhanced giants. And the movie wears its ambition on its puppeteered sleeves at a time when original risks of its scope are rarer in Hollywood than ever. 

Knight chose to release Wildwood via Fathom in part to guarantee a full theatrical drop. As he started shopping the project around, streaming kept coming up. “The reality is most things end up going in that direction,” he says. “For this film in particular, I knew that it needed a different kind of treatment.” Still, aspects of the strategy have fallen outside of his control — including a PG-13 rating from the MPA, unusual for an animated feature, that cites the amount of blood as among the reasons.

“I didn’t care for that,” Knight says. But the rating did not exactly shock him: “The film is intended for a family audience, but a family audience with a certain degree of sophistication — that’s what the film is. It’s a lot more grown-up.”

It speaks to Knight’s larger mission in balancing his roles as executive and artist — keeping things afloat while sticking to what he believes in, no matter the conventional wisdom. Wildwood will land in a climate far different from the one in which it originated. The use of AI across filmmaking has exploded, while Knight remains staunchly opposed: “For what I hold dear, for what matters to me certainly in filmmaking, it’s antithetical to everything I stand for.”

The process of stop-motion filmmaking — even one later digitally enhanced as Wildwood had to be — requires an amount of dedicated time and attention to detail that seems laughably, or laudably, out of touch for an industry keen on quick fixes. 

But Knight sticks to his guns. He brought in six-time Oscar-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel to shoot Wildwood, imbuing the form with a fresh cinematic sensibility. They shot it over two years. “In the period of a day, I’d be running around from the first scene of the movie to the last battle scene to the scene where Prue gets taken prisoner,” Deschanel says. “It just depended on when sets were ready, when puppets were ready, when props were ready.”

Yet in conversation, the DP sounds galvanized by the process — and watching Wildwood, his signature approaches to lighting and framing are evident, even in the entirely animated picture. “There’s something to be said for things being difficult that forces you into a mode where you have to rise to that occasion,” he says.

This articulates Knight’s philosophy rather neatly. It might just extend to the life the director hopes Wildwood can lead well beyond its opening weekend. 

“We live in an era that’s largely frictionless,” he says. “Everything is designed to make things easier and quicker. But stop-motion asks something different of us — that we take our time, slow down, put our care and our energy into something that demands our attention. When Skynet is forming and the streets are littered with human remains, we will still be up there, churning butter and making movies from a clockmaker’s window. We’ll keep at it until they pry it from our hands — because there’s a place in this world for handmade art.”

This story appeared in the Oct. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.