In 2004 at age 29, Travis Knight learned in a phone call that his brother, Matthew, who was four years older, had died in a scuba diving accident in El Salvador. It was Travis’ responsibility to find his parents — Nike founder Phil Knight and his wife, Penny Knight, who were out at a movie — and tell them.
“That was maybe the worst day of my entire life,” says Knight, president and chief executive of the Oregon-based stop-motion animation studio Laika. “My brother and I had unresolved things. I just wish I could have had one final conversation with him,” he says during an interview in Los Angeles. “I was intensely, profoundly angry at the unfairness of it all.”
Knight, now 41, has directed a film that grapples with some of those same issues, “Kubo and the Two Strings,” which opened last month. An epic set in a fantastical version of ancient Japan, the film follows a boy named Kubo who is trying to locate a magical suit of armor once worn by his late father.
“When Kubo responds to grief and loss and he’s got rage and anger, that’s real, that’s what we feel,” Knight says. “It took me a good long while before I could make peace with it myself.”
Like each of Laika’s three earlier features — “Coraline,” “ParaNorman” and “The Boxtrolls” — “Kubo and the Two Strings” feels wildly different from the films made by larger animation studios. Knight declines to discuss the budget for “Kubo” but says that, if the budgets for all four of Laika’s feature films were added together, the total would be less than the cost of making a major computer-animated film at Disney or Pixar.
He’s also proud that Laika doesn’t have a house style, though it might be fair to say that the studio’s style reflects Knight’s personal tastes, developed during a childhood spent largely alone exploring art. It’s a style that has worked for the studio; all three earlier features earned Oscar nominations, and each grossed more than $100 million worldwide.
Written by Marc Haimes and Chris Butler from an original story by Haimes and Shannon Tindle, “Kubo” is Knight’s first film as director. But he has been a hands-on executive at Laika since the studio was launched in 2005. He was a producer and animator on “ParaNorman” and “The Boxtrolls” and a lead animator on “Coraline.”
The voice cast for “Kubo and the Two Strings” includes Art Parkinson (Rickon Stark on “Game of Thrones”) as Kubo, Charlize Theron as a stern-talking monkey charged with keeping Kubo safe, Matthew McConaughey as a protector known as Beetle and Rooney Mara as the spooky pair of sisters who haunt Kubo on his journey.
Many of the ideas presented in the film and its aesthetic were informed by books and art Knight discovered through his parents. Growing up in Hillsboro, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, Knight learned to love fantasies such as those by J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and L. Frank Baum, thanks to his mother, an avid reader. At age 8, he visited Japan while accompanying his father on a business trip and came home with a backpack full of manga comics.
“I spent most of my time alone,” Knight says of his growing-up years. “I made friends slowly when I made them at all. Most of my time I spent making things — writing stories, drawing, making music.”
At the time, Phil Knight was building Nike into a retail giant and often traveling for business. “When you’re growing up and you see a parent working so hard to build something … all these things come at a cost. … As a kid, you don’t necessarily understand that. When I found animation, that’s when I finally understood it.”
Although he was developing an artistic sensibility as a child, Travis Knight didn’t see art as a career choice. “I didn’t know anybody who was a professional artist,” he says. “I figured I’d have to be a proper grown-up and make a career for myself in finance.”
Travis Knight’s grandfather, a lawyer and newspaper publisher, had been skeptical of Phil Knight’s plans to build a shoe company. And with his dad Phil building Nike into a retail giant when he was a child, Travis wanted to blaze his own path, briefly trying rap music and getting a bachelor’s degree in social science from Portland State University before settling in as an animator at Will Vinton Studios, where he worked on the TV show “The PJs” and on some commercials.
“The Knight boys have a long tradition of disappointing their fathers,” he says. “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.”
Phil Knight’s success has helped facilitate his son’s. When Will Vinton Studios struggled financially in the late 1990s, Phil Knight invested in it, ultimately becoming its majority shareholder. In 2005, after Will Vinton shut down, Laika was founded from its ashes, and it now employs 500 to 600 people at a time.
As an animator, Knight is known for his speed and focus. The painstaking, solitary task of moving puppets frame by frame on a stop-motion animation stage suits his temperament. That kind of animation was made famous by artists such as Ray Harryhausen in the 1960s, but is rarely performed at the scale that Laika does it today, except at Britain’s Aardman Animations.
Knight’s vision for Laika has been to diverge from the practices of mainstream animators. “When I became a father, I saw what passed for family entertainment,” says Knight, whose children are now 15, 13 and 3. “So much of it was vapid. I wanted to make things that mattered. I wanted to surprise people.”
