First time film director, Travis Knight, has created what critics are hailing as a masterpiece by combing legendary stop action animation with other techniques. It has been dubbed a bit of a hybrid film in that computer animation, combined with both stop action and a 3D printer, brought his film, Kubo and the Two Strings, an Academy Award nomination not only in the VFX category but also a nomination for Best Animated Feature. An animated feature getting an Oscar nod in the VFX category is extremely rare.
Knight, 43, upon hearing the news of the VFX nomination said that, “It’s shocking, not because I don’t think it’s deserving, but because it required the visual effects branch to look at what we do in a different way. Really, the whole thing is a visual effect. If you go back to the dawn of cinema, stop motion was one of the first visual effects.”
Knight, CEO of Laika Studios, based in Portland, Oregon, remembers that he first fell in love with stop action as a young boy. It happened right after he saw the 1933 film classic, King Kong. From that point on, young Travis knew where his life would be headed. He also recalls that working on the film was slow and excruciating. It would often take a forty hour week just to get two minutes of actual film footage.
The idea for doing Kubo and the Two Strings came to him by way of a friend. Shannon Tindle, a character designer who worked on the film Coraline, approached him with the idea. Knight loved it because he loves Japanese animation and remembers fondly a trip to Japan with his dad when he was just an impressionable 8 years old. His father is Phil Knight, the founder of the Nike Company.
Laika Studios has had some serious success over the past several years. Laika’s Coraline (2009) made $124.6 million worldwide and was nominated for an Academy Award. Likewise for their next two, ParaNorman (2012) and The Boxtrolls (2014).
He saw the tale coming together and said that, “It’s a story about loss and healing and forgiveness. It’s about how loving someone or something can make you vulnerable, but also give you strength. It was the most demanding experience of my life. It was like shooting a stop-motion David Lean movie.”
Back in the early 1980’s, Knight found work with the cutting edge stop motion animation company Wil Vinton Studios. They had developed the California Raisins characters, and the ensuing TV commercials, and they also coined the phrase “claymation”. By the end of the 1990’s, with the dawn of the new century, Vinton began to fall on extremely hard times. The economy was collapsing around everyone and the stop motion industry was being seriously damaged by CGI. Fortunately for Travis, father Phil invested heaily in the company and renamed it Laika (Russian for “dog”) Studios. Soon after, Travis became the President and CEO of Laika Studios.
This first directing project was made for around $60 million and 3D imagery was heavily used throughout the making of the picture. However, after he took on the project, he said, “I bit off more than I could chew. I figured I could direct, animate and run the company, no problem. But it was more than I could handle. I would come in the early morning and crank out a few frames before the day would begin, and then at the end of the day, I’d go back and crank out a few more. As an animator, it was really frustrating to work that way. But I love it. I can’t not do it.”
For Kubo, however, Knight wanted a harder edge and dug deep into pain and death and loss. After losing a brother to a car accident back in 2004, he knew the pain of loss.
“I wanted to approach [the subject of death] with sincerity and honesty. The understanding that while (the dead) are not physically with us, we can carry them with us in our lives — that’s the understanding and resolution Kubo comes to in the movie. It took me years to come to that resolution myself.”
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