Quotes from Travis Knight

I won't say which one, but one shot on 'Kubo' took two months to get the expression right. It's ridiculous on some level.

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.

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

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.

We're constantly trying to find the best way to tell the stories that we want.

Phil is my father. He's a part of who I am. But I don't want to be defined by that.

If you go back and look at those films, movies like 'Bambi' and 'Pinocchio,' there are elements that are incredibly dark. Yet no one batted an eye, thinking that kind of entertainment was inappropriate for children.

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.

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

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.

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.

At LAIKA, we try to find an artful balance of darkness and light, intensity and warmth, and humor and heart. The idea of being able to bring that philosophy to 'Bumblebee' was really exciting.

Within a safe environment, the theater, you can have a big ride, big ups and downs, intensity, warmth, humanity, laughs, tears - you want that full range of emotion.

You see it in the stuff I've done at Laika: I've always tried to make movies that have an artful blend of darkness and light, intensity and warmth. That have a thinking brain and a strong beating heart at the centre of it.

Works of art are like a Trojan horse. Under the surface is always some artist's deeply held philosophy on their view of the world. But on the other hand, you do not want to make it feel like medicine. You do not want to make it feel like an afternoon TV special where you're trying to hammer a message into someone's head.

I'm a huge fan of what Marvel did, it's no surprise for anyone to know that as a child I was a huge fan of comics.

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.

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

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

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.

Let's be honest, working in stop motion is awful. It's the worst. It's such a stupid way to make a movie. It's ridiculous. You're literally playing around with these dolls that are maybe 9 inches tall, trying to coax a performance out of 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 think anytime you see something that's been brought to life by an artist's hands, it just has a different kind of quality.

I love 'Princess Mononoke,' 'My Neighbour Totoro.'