Top 55 Travis Knight Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I know I have exacting standards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

I love ‘Spirited Away,’ that’s a huge one.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

I made friends slowly when I made them at all.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I love ‘Princess Mononoke,’ ‘My Neighbour Totoro.’

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.

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.

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.

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.

You only have so much time on this planet.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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