After serving as an animation lead on Coraline, Travis Knight gets to make a bigger mark on Laika as president/CEO.

BD: Let's discuss Claire's role and her impact on what we might expect?

TK: I think Claire's a really incredible woman and, quite frankly, I think she classes up the joint with her sophistication and wide ranging experience and impeccable taste. Everything she's worked on has been terrific and it's due in no small way to her involvement. And what we've been focusing on almost exclusively since we wrapped the release of Coraline has been the development of other projects. That is the essential constituent of any animated company. We have taken the position at the studio to be an artist and creator and director-driven place. The onus, the burden and the creative freedom go to the director, so we really are looking for distinctive voices and visions for our films. We're really fortunate to have Henry as one of our directors because he is one of the truest auteurs working in animation today. And one of the things I'm proudest of Coraline was that we were able to provide the environment where, in a very pure way, he was able to tell the story he wanted to tell.

BD: What are your plans for proceeding with the proposed campus construction?

TK: Right now we occupy three buildings in two different cities and clearly that's not ideal. Obviously the allure of a campus is you're able to integrate everybody into one place. Unfortunately, when you have multiple buildings in different areas is that it's difficult to maintain one common culture between every aspect of the company, and so we're trying to find ways to bring everyone together. We don't want to build this massive campus before we're ready, before we've earned it, essentially. So that remains a long-term goal of ours. But in the interim we're actively exploring a way to bring everyone else together into one facility.

BD: What's it going to be like not being as hands on as an artist once you're in production again?

TK: It's one of those things for people who are in stop-motion that it's in the blood, really. Guys like Eric Leighton, who started in stop-motion and moved to CG and was incredibly successful in that area, working on Dinosaur and doing supervision on King Kong, and yet he turned his back to all of that to be an animator on Coraline. I think that says something about the people who do it. I made a pact with myself when I moved into this area, that I never wanted to lose a direct connection with the work, so I'll never be able to devote the time that I did to Coraline in terms of hands on animation, but my plan is to work in some fashion on every single film that we do and to actually doing some animation on the floor. It's something that attracted me to this art form to begin with; it's something that I love; and I don't want to miss out on it.

BD: What's it like running your father's company?

TK: It's a funny thing: you grow up in a household where you see sort of the trial that my father went through as a child, and I certainly have a great deal of appreciation for it now. It's one of those things where there are parallels. My grandfather was a real distinguished member of his community -- he was a very accomplished lawyer and the publisher of the second largest Oregon newspaper at the time. And you can imagine what his reaction might've been when his son told him that he wanted to be a cobbler and make shoes for a living. He was completely devastated and I don't know if it's completely dissimilar when I broke the news to my dad that I had a deep and abiding love to play with dolls for a living. But we all follow our muse and it's what makes us who we are. The great thing about it is that personally I now have a different sort of connection to my father, so it's another thing that we can discuss strategy for the business. And, quite frankly, I can't imagine a better, smarter, more experienced advisor than my father.

BD: And what's it going to be like being Henry's boss on his next movie?

TK: There's no doubt about it that it will be weird. But that's been my life. I've never been comfortable; I'm completely neurotic and feel like crawling under my desk right now.

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN and VFXWorld.