Judging from previews, the film will be a technical and aesthetic triumph. It’s a candy-colored animated fantasy loaded with eye-popping visuals and featuring the voices of Dakota Fanning (as Coraline), Teri Hatcher (as Coraline’s mother), and John Hodgman (as Coraline’s father). There’s a dreamy, almost trippy Alice in Wonderland quality to Coraline’s world, packed with kaleidoscopic flower gardens and creepy lurking shadows. There’s also an eccentric Russian acrobat who’s secretly rehearsing a mouse circus, and an entire Other World where all the characters have buttons for eyes.
Still, the Hollywood graveyard is littered with films that looked amazing, broke new technical ground—and then tanked. The recession is only making it harder for an unproven studio to raise development money. Simply producing an animated feature film and getting it into general release puts a studio in a rather elite club. Last year, nearly twenty animated features went into nationwide release. Of those, only four or five were anything close to being major hits, including WALL-E, Kung Fu Panda, and Horton Hears a Who. “Building an animation studio is not an easy road,” says Vinton, who has experienced both success and failure on that score, having built Vinton Studios only to see it go nearly bankrupt. “There are plenty of deep-pocket operations that haven’t quite succeeded. Success is certainly not a foregone conclusion in animation like it is in some businesses where a deep enough pocket can take over the market.”
Among Portland animators, Phil Knight’s dream has stimulated both hope and skepticism. “There are a lot of people coming into Laika who have come from other high-quality studios,” says Teresa Drilling, a Portland animator who worked on Coraline and who previously worked for Vinton Studios. “When I first came to Portland in 1987, everybody in the animation community knew everybody else. It’s really grown up since then. Now, with Laika, even people in the animation community who aren’t interested in mainstream work have a large, stable employer in town.”
Andy Collen, producer and director at Happy Trails Animation, believes the hard work for Laika still lies ahead. “I’m really hoping that Laika works,” he says. “But you can’t run an animation studio like you do a shoe company. Laika’s gone out and hired some big-name animators”—Dan Casey, who heads Laika’s Digital Design Group, was a lead artist for Columbia Pictures’ animated feature Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within; Dan Philips, a vice president and head of production, once headed computer-generated imagery for Walt Disney Feature Animation; Mary Sandell, a Laika producer, was a producer at DreamWorks Animation SKG; Helen Kalafatic, another producer, produced SpongeBob SquarePants for Nickelodeon—“but just because someone worked at Disney doesn’t mean they know how to build a studio.”
Laika isn’t pinning all its hopes on feature films. A separate division, Laika/house, is already profitable, churning out slick animated TV commercials for M&M’s, Ben & Jerry’s, and Coca-Cola. Whether Laika’s feature film studio is here to stay depends largely on how determined Phil Knight is to make it in the movie business.
Coraline brings the Knight family tale full circle. Back when Travis was a teenager, Phil had dreams of his son one day joining him at Nike. But Travis was never interested in the shoe business. New pursuits were a familiar pattern in the family: Phil’s father, William W. Knight, a successful Southern Oregon lawyer and publisher, tried to interest his son in a traditional business career, but Phil chose the riskier path of becoming a sporting-goods entrepreneur.
Published: February 2009
