LAIKA ISN’T JUST A STUDIO. IT’S A WAY OF LIFE. AS THE MASTERS OF STOP-MOTION ANIMATION PAINSTAKINGLY PUT TOGETHER THEIR BIGGEST PROJECT YET, WE VISIT THEIR PORTLAND HQ TO DISCOVER THEIR SLOW-MOVING SECRETS

WORDS NICK DE SEMLYEN

Travis Knight, photographed exclusively for Empire at Laika Studios, Portland, Oregon, on 4 April 2023.

PORTFOLIO SHAYAN ASGHARNIA

Knight with a mansion set built for Wildwood, inspired by a real location in Portland.

The dogfight was going to look awesome. The boy was sure of it. Buzzing from the movies he had sat through, enthralled, on Saturday-morning TV or at cinema matinées in his farm town outside of Portland, Oregon — stop-motion classics such as the Ray Harryhausen-enhanced The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad and Rankin/Bass’ Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer — he had already attempted to inject life into Star Wars action figures. Now, it was time for something a little more spectacular. He marched to his X-wing toy, like a titchy Wedge Antilles, grasped it in his eager hands and proceeded to film it, frame by frame, soaring through the sky, little explosions created using balls of cotton. His mind boggled at how incredible it was going to look when he unveiled his final cut.

“Well, it looked like garbage,” laughs Travis Knight now. “I was like, ‘I’m going to have this amazing aerial battle here!’ It was so fun to imagine what it could be. And then you see the end result, and it wasn’t what you imagined. So that was heartbreaking.”

Flash-forward some 40-odd years, and Knight is still tinkering with his toys. He’s still just outside Portland, Oregon. Except now those toys are no longer purchased from the nearest Walmart. And rather than his parents’ basement, all alone, he’s in a giant warehouse complex, assisted by roughly 400 ridiculously talented people. This is Laika, the studio behind the likes of Coraline, ParaNorman and Kubo And The Two Strings: 964 miles up the coast from Hollywood but light years away in terms of how things are done. No sequels. No chatter about “IP”. Productions that are not rushed through the system like fast-food, but baked like gourmet dishes in a clay oven. Their new stop-motion epic, Wildwood, has been in development for 12 years; it’s finally due out in 2025.

It’s not always been smooth sailing here, but this is still a place where dreams come true. Very, very slowly.

“I have a big aerial dogfight scene in this movie, with a giant bird,” smiles Knight. “So, you know, good things come to pass.”

There’s a go-kart track around the corner from Laika, called K1 Speed. Every now and again, somebody from the studio will head there, clamber inside a buggy and hit the throttle, hard. Whizzing around a circuit at high velocity is a form of recalibration. Because at Laika, despite the presence of an in-studio coffee shop called Dripster’s (named after a location in Wildwood), things move at, well, puppet pace.