Quotes from Travis Knight

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

When you look back over 100 years when stop-motion was really at the dawn of cinema, a lot of the ways it developed was you had stage magicians who were looking to bring their illusions to life, and one of the ways they did that, at the time, was through cinema and stop-motion. They developed these processes.

It's a very difficult thing to adapt a piece of existing material into film.

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.

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

One of the great many things I love about being a father is sharing my beloved childhood experiences with my kids.

We had so many firsts on 'Coraline' that I couldn't quite see where we'd go from there, but for 'ParaNorman' we developed this 'skewed naturalism' that marries a lot of intricate detail with a more cinematic approach, then just built on all that and pushed those techniques even further, so we can tell our stories that much more effectively.

You throw a rock in Hollywood and you're going to hit someone in the film industry.

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

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

I take a firm stand against sequels. My industry brethren are a little shocked at how firmly I'm committed to not doing sequels.

My grandfather, my dad's dad, he was a lawyer. He was a state legislator. He was the publisher of Oregon's second largest newspaper. He was a pretty amazing guy.

If you go too small, you can't get the performance you need out of the small little parts. And if you go too big, the puppet gets difficult to move, because it's too heavy, and there's too much material, and it becomes this exercise in just moving these massive parts around. So there is a natural scale that makes sense for stop-motion.

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

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.

Stop-motion is filmmaking at the pace of a glacier. In live action, you're moving so quickly.

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

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.

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.

The water in 'Life of Pi' is very realistic.

This medium of stop-motion, it can be much more than it's been kind of defined as - it's not just a creaky and anachronistic way of making films, it actually is a very vital art form that can do wonderful things if put in the right hands.

If you look at 'Coraline' and you look at 'ParaNorman' certainly you can tell that there are threads of the same DNA between those two movies, but they're two very different kinds of movies. They look different, they feel different, they are very different kinds of movies.

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

One of the things that gives stop-motion its inherent magic is that you're seeing something imperfect and thus undeniably human - because it's made by human hands.