( Coraline ’s off-kilter look and sensibility can largely be traced to Selick, who brought the story to Laika.) Coraline is something of a misfit in an animated-movie business that lately has raked in millions by padding its features with fart jokes and whimsical toys that spring to life. “Some days I’m very confident about how Coraline will do,” Phil Knight says. “Other days, not so much. It’s a typical entrepreneurial thing. Every day, there are a lot of crises to deal with. We’re just coming to the end of the first chapter with Laika now. I don’t want to underplay that it’s a big deal how well Coraline does. We’ll get the first [box office] numbers on February 8. So keep me away from tall buildings that day.”
Coraline is also a father-and-son story, of Phil and his son Travis, thirty-five. Travis was Coraline ’s lead animator and, as a Laika board member, is being groomed to succeed his father and control the company.
Phil and Travis have a curiously symbiotic relationship: Phil wouldn’t have entered the movie business if it weren’t for Travis’s passion for animation, and Travis wouldn’t be a budding studio executive if it weren’t for Phil. Travis may be a billionaire’s son, but he’s roundly respected in his own right. Animation Magazine named him one of its Rising Stars of Animation in 2007, and Selick lauds him as “truly one of the best animators I’ve ever worked with,” saying Travis possesses the coveted combination of technical chops and an innate artistic sensibility, something that cannot be taught.
Father and son are a study in similarities and contrasts. In public, Phil, who is shy, usually wears sunglasses for television interviews and photo sessions, and he seldom talks in paragraphs when a single sentence will do. The few words he does say are chosen carefully, and he values the same quality in others—he’s famous for asking employees to explain their position “in twenty-five words or less.” Travis is more easygoing and open but shares his father’s reluctance to call attention to himself. Coworkers call Travis a regular guy, a description usually delivered with a sense of wonder that someone with his advantages has turned out so normal. Of their prominent shared qualities, the Knights both have piercing Windex-blue eyes and a commitment to work that borders on obsession. For Coraline, Travis put in sixteen-hour workdays; he was usually the first to arrive at the studio and the last to leave—the same sort of single-minded determination that his father showed in turning a tiny athletic-shoe company called Blue Ribbon Sports into a Fortune 500 Goliath named Nike.
“We stand a chance to be a creative force in Portland that really does have its own point of view…You can’t chase Pixar or DreamWorks. We have to be our own thing.” -Travis Knight
“I want to see Laika be a huge success—for selfish reasons, of course—but also for Portland,” Travis tells me. He’s wearing beat-up boots that definitely aren’t Nikes. “I’ve lived in the area most of my life, and it’s a place I love. I think in some ways what Portland is as a city is reflected in what Laika is trying to be as a company. Portland is kind of this odd cross between a progressive urban center and a frontier watering hole. It’s hippies and hillbillies commingling. I think having that dissonance as a backdrop to Laika is fertile ground for creativity.”
If the Knights’ movie gamble pays off, Portland stands to share in the profits. Just as Pixar has turned the San Francisco Bay Area into a viable animation outpost, Laika could well do the same for Portland, a town that already has given the animation world the California Raisins, animator Bill Plympton, Simpsons creator Matt Groening, and Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, and scores of other cartoon characters).
Yet before the Knights can build their Hollywood-on-the-
Willamette, a fickle public will have to pass judgment on Coraline. Building a successful independent animation studio to rival the likes of Pixar and DreamWorks is by no means an Air Jordan slam-dunk. In today’s crushingly competitive movie business, it’s still an open question whether a quirky independent animation studio can be built on a swoosh and a dream.
Published: February 2009
