The next person who complains how bad this summer’s movie season was in one breath, and then tells me they haven’t seen the new Laika animation work KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS in the next, is getting a swift kick to the groin by me. KUBO is a deeply moving and beautifully rendered combination of stop-motion animation and CG enhancements from first-time feature director Travis Knight, who also happens to be the President and CEO of Laika and has been animation supervisor on all of the studio’s previous works—CORALINE, PARANORMAN, and THE BOXTROLLS, as well as the breakthrough, award-winning short MOONGIRL.
The son of Nike founder and chairman Phil Knight (Travis joined that company’s board of directors in 2015), Travis has always positioned himself and Laika as a home for true artists, whether they be animators, filmmakers, puppeteers, or computer geniuses who know how to make their work blend seamlessly with traditional stop-motion animation. And the results speak for themselves. Laika has never been afraid to “go dark” with its storylines, and placing their child characters in danger or scaring younger members of their audiences are just part of the work. In KUBO, the young, one-eyed hero is being pursued by evil spirits that mean him a great deal of harm, and there are some genuinely scary moments included in the movie. And its all the better for it.
But there’s also a ridiculous amount of creativity at play in KUBO, and an energy generated by voice actors such as Charlize Theron, Matthew McConaughey, Ralph Fiennes, and Rooney Mara that is so perfect for the material that it brings everything to life in a way few animated films these days. As far as I’m concerned, KUBO is far and away the odds-on favorite for animated feature come awards season, and Knight’s passion and personal stake in the storyline propels the film into the category of masterpiece. I had a chance to sit down with Knight recently in Chicago, the morning after he and I did a post-screening Q&A for the film, and he’s one of the coolest, most knowledgable, and most thoughtful filmmakers I’ve ever spoken with. Please enjoy my talk with Travis Knight, and go see KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS if you haven’t already…
Capone: Hello again.
Travis Knight: Good to see you again.
Capone: I always get this sense, and correct me if I’m wrong, that animation houses all watch what the others are doing, even if they’re not working in the same medium. Like they watch to see in what ways the bar is being raised or lowered. For example, when something like ANOMALISA comes out, what is the feeling that resonates through the office? Do you watch what everyone’s doing just to see what’s going on out there, or are you fairly isolated?
TK: Well, we’re definitely isolated geographically. We’re in Portland, Oregon, so there’s no other animation shop nearby. I think because of that, it’s allowed us to develop our own unique and individual culture, independent of everything else. So you’re certainly aware of what’s happening. I watch all of the animated films, and not just from a competitive standpoint. I love animation, so I love to see movies and I love to see what other artists are doing, but it really doesn't influence us in any way.
We know what movies we’re making; we’re constantly trying to evolve our artistic and our technological capabilities; and we’re trying to tell the stories that we tell. You see something like ANOMALISA—and I’m certainly glad it exists—there’s a boldness to it that’s unusual for animation, but it has nothing to do with what we’ll do moving forward. It’s just like “Oh, that’s a cool film!”
Capone: The only reason I thought of it is because, when we were standing out in the hallway and you were asking me about SAUSAGE PARTY, I’m thought you might have a little bit more of an interest in that than some. Or your interest might be different.
TK: What I do appreciate about things like ANOMALISA and SAUSAGE PARTY is that I think there is, by and large, of course there are exceptions, I think there is a generic “sameness” to so much of what dominates modern American animation. So when you see something that’s different, that has a unique take on something, or explores different territory, I think that’s exciting. I think animation could benefit from more of that kind of variety. So I love that those things exist.
Capone: Laika’s first three features featured what I would consider a very western version of the supernatural—a westernized take on ghosts and zombies. With KUBO, you’ve gone into another direction. You’ve gone into a culture where ghosts and demons are engrained in the society. They’re not considered supernatural. They’re just part of the mythology of that culture. It’s also not something that’s always feared. In the film, the villagers are embracing these spirits coming back to visit them in certain scenes, and they’re dreading it in other scenes. Did you have to realign your storytelling a bit to capture that?
TK: Yeah. I think that at its core, the film is fundamentally about family. We explore loss and healing and love and compassion and empathy, and we set in this place for a reason. As I said last night, I’ve been a fan of big, epic fantasies since I was a kid. That was one of the first great gifts my mom gave me, and I was introduced to Japan when I was eight years old by my dad. He let me tag along on one of his business trips to Japan. I grew up in Portland, so I had never seen anything like it, and that was really the beginning of this love affair I had with this culture. I came home with a big bag of Manga comic books and art, and even though I didn’t understand the language, there was something power of about the visual storytelling and the clarity of it that you could understand.
It’s been a huge part of my life for so long, this vital culture. It’s been something I’ve loved, something I’ve admired forever, and it’s something we don’t typically see on the big screen, and this film offered us an opportunity to pay homage to that. I look at it the way that about half a dozen of Miyazaki’s films are either set in or inspired by Europe. But he’s not trying to accurately depict a documentary-style version of Europe. What I love is, he takes something he’s fascinated by or has an interest in, and he internalizes it. He synthesizes it, and he weaves that into his work. So it’s effectively like an impressionist painting of the place, and that’s our version of Japan. It’s not Japan, even though it’s heavily influenced by it and researched. We looked at regional and historical research for everything we did in the movie, but it’s not actually of Japan, but it’s kind of an impressionist painting of Japan. It’s trying to capture the experience and the feeling that I had when I was exposed to it for the first time. It’s just this incredible, magical place.
Because we explore things like death and loss, there is that aspect to it that you mentioned earlier. It’s interesting how in American culture, often times, that’s something that we fear greatly, probably for good reason. It’s the great unknown. With Obon Festival, which we feature in the film, it’s a celebration of our ancestors and our connectivity to the people that we’ve lost, and that even though they’re not in our lives, we carry them with us. We carry them and their experiences with us in some way, and I think there’s something beautiful about that. How we become part of this oneness. That’s something that’s fairly unusual in western film, but it’s something you see all the time in Japanese folk tales and mythology. It’s something we wove into the film because of what the film talks about, and I think there’s something beautiful abut that.
Capone: Without giving away any of the secrets of the film, you said the film is about family both blood relatives and also this makeshift family that comes together around Kubo to protect him. Are you trying to capture that that somehow this kid will be protected by somebody, whether its his actual family or these magical animal creatures?
TK: Yeah. He goes on this insane adventure, and the whole thing is a maturation metaphor. It’s about crossing the Rubicon from childhood to adulthood, and so there are great things that come of that, as we know, those of us who have gone through the experience, but there are also things that we leave behind. There is a cost to that process, and that’s something we explore in the movie. It’s a classic Hero’s Journey. Typically, in both western and eastern stories, you often find the mentor figure is a male in folkloric tradition, and I love the fact that in this film that his guardian, his guide is this female figure [Theron’s Monkey character].
What was at the core of it, which always got me excited and meant something to me, is it’s effectively a story about a boy and his mother and that relationship that they have and the things that they give each other, and when those things begin to shift in our lives. So I love that his guide is no nonsense. She’s not nurturing. She’s not sweetness and light. She is effectively a symbol of the strength of a mother’s love without the tenderness. But of course, as the film progresses we see different shades of her and everything else. But yeah, they become this makeshift family for this boy, and then of course by the time we get to the end, he’s got a different kind of a family, and I think it’s a broader family and there’s something beautiful about that as well.
Capone: Let’s talk about visual influences, both in art and in other filmmakers. You said you spent years doing research before you do a single frame of the film.
TK: Literally years. Yeah, we started shooting after this project had been in development for three years. So it took us two years to actually physically make it when we were shooting, but it was three years of prep work to get to that point. So yeah, some of the biggest influences visually are ukiyo-e—it literally means “pictures of the floating world.” You see paintings in ukiyo-e. I think the thing that most people associate with that form of art is the classic Japanese woodblock print. The most well known one is Hokusai’s “Great Wave off Kanagawa,” which is this, I’m sure you can capture it as we’re talking about it. It’s that wave with kind of the curling white caps with these striations, and you see Mount Fuji in the back. That form of art was a huge influence on the movie. In fact, we see a nod to that image at the beginning of the movie with that giant, perfect-storm wave that’s inspired by that image.
There’s something that’s beautiful about it. I think with the way woodblock prints are made, it requires artist to simplify nature. That’s part of the aesthetic. So Hokusai was a huge influence. Hiroshige was a huge influence—some of the masters in woodblock print making. The biggest visual influence in the movie artistically was Kiyoshi Saito, who was this brilliant graphic artist in Japan in the 20th century. He’s a really interesting cat, because he’s completely self taught, and he developed a different, new way of making woodblock prints. Typically it was something that was, you know, you’d have your designer, your painter, your carver, your publisher. It was like three or four different artists who would be involved in making one print. Saito did everything himself. I think because of that, there’s just this raw quality to his work.
In fact, most artists would try to hide the grain of the wood in their work. He embraced it, and that was a key part of his compositions. In fact, when you look at the stylistic throughline for the film, so many of the textures from the sky and the costumes and the sets and the props, they have this naturally occurring woodgrain texture that’s woven throughout, and that gave it it’s stylistic throughline. The thing that’s interesting about Saito, he comes from a tradition of Japanese woodblock print making that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years, but he was also really excited about new western thinkers and new western thinkers, so guys like Edward Munch and Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. So cubists and modernists mixed with Japanese classicism merging together in this one guy, so it was east and west, and old and new, and the real and the imagined all in one body, and that’s everything we try to do at Laika, infuse all those things together in our art.
Capone: You also mentioned last night about the origami aspect of the film. There are things that look paper-y that aren’t even supposed to be paper, but paper is also a huge part of this story. Can you talk about incorporating that?
TK: It is. The art of origami is the art of transformation which is one of the key themes of the film. Animators see a lot of themselves in origamists. You take this simple geometric shape, and through the will, the imagination and the skill of the artist, they transform it into something else, and that’s what we do as animators. So on our last film [THE BOXTROLLS], it was a completely different aesthetic. There were all these nervous lines, and crooked and warped shapes. This film, because it was inspired a lot by origami, it’s very geometrical. There are perfect right angles. So when we start building this stuff, oftentimes one of the first things we did is we would build it in paper before we built it using the real materials that we used, and it just gave it a style, a stylistic throughline that we capture throughout the entire movie.
Capone: Do you not usually do that?
TK: No, it’s specific to this movie, because that was one of the key visual influences. When we made Kubo’s kimono, the first thing that we did was we made it out of paper, and then we figured out how that would look, and then we tried to make sure we were capturing how kimonos were actually made and what these folds mean and everything else. And then we do it for real. For the actual origami, originally we tried using real paper, but it didn’t work. It would deteriorate too quickly.
So we ended up using Tyvek, which is this plastic-y material that in construction they use cover homes in or make FedEx envelopes out of. And then when a character would go from a piece of paper to transform into the shape, or whatever it happens to be, we actually found the perfect material for that in the men’s room. Our animator found that the automatic paper towel dispensers in he bathroom were the perfect consistency—the kind with the back with the aluminum cinefoil—and he painted it and could manipulate it perfectly. So you find stuff all over the place, even in the men’s room.
Capone: I think I saw a quality in Monkey’s face where light could go through it. One of the first shots of Monkey is a profile shot, and that’s when you really notice it.
TK: It’s the material that we use. We use different technologies in bringing them to life. In KUBO, we’ve been using replacement technology since CORALINE. It’s 3D printing, it’s this crazy “Buck Rogers”/“Star Trek” technology. For the last three films, we’ve been using this powder-like substance, which has this skin-like quality. When light interacts with it, it actually has some kind of sub-surface scattering. It actually bleeds through the ears. There’s this great scene we did on PARANORMAN where he’s standing with the sun behind him, and you can actually see the light coming through his ears. But for Monkey and for Beatle, we actually used different printing technologies, more of this plastic-y material, but we made sure that we infused the prints with different kinds of colors so that when it interacts with the light, it actually feels like flesh. It feels like a real material, not plastic. There are a couple of great scenes where she’s silhouetted by the sun, and you can just see the beautiful skin on her face. It really acts like real skin.
Capone: I want to talk about the Akira Kurosawa influence here as well, and I believe you said last night that you also have his favorite actor represented here as well.
TK: There’s not a filmmaker alive that hasn’t been influenced directly or indirectly by Akira Kurosawa. Steven Spielberg called him a pictorial Shakespeare, which I think sums it up pretty perfectly, not the least of which because he was also influenced by Shakespeare in his work. He’s a master. I think the cinematic epic really did start in Japan, I think that’s because of him. So with this film, he towers over all other filmic influences in this movie. He’s an aesthetic muse just in his compositions and his cutting and his staging, in the movement of the camera and the lighting. But it’s also what he made movies about that I think is really exciting. His philosophy behind the films that he makes, so that was woven throughout all the film.
Then there are moments that are actually inspired by specific moments in his films, like when we see Kubo’s ancestral home. That image was inspired by the ragged fortress from RASHOMON. When we catch a glimpse of Kubo’s father in the film, his design was inspired by Toshiro Mifune, who has been in so many of those great Kurosawa films including YOJIMBO. That thing that he wears and the style and everything that he has in that movie is the look that we took for Kubo’s father.
Capone: When I first learned about Kurosawa in college, the professor always said you could stop the film anywhere, take that frame, blow it up, and hang it on a wall.
TK: Every frame is like a painting. It’s like a beautiful work of art.
Capone: In terms of like composition—
TK: Yes. Perfect.
Capone: And I watched this film the second time looking at it from that perspective: Could you stop this movie at any one place and frame it?
TK: [laughs] Maybe not at any one place, but I think you could stop at a lot of places, and it looks like a beautiful illustration.
Capone: You mentioned last night that you’re hoping Laika can increase the pace so that you can have something out every year, and you said you’re already working on the next film, and I completely blew it and should have said, “What’s that?”
TK: [laughs] Oh, I can’t tell you. I would tell you if I could.
Capone: I thought once it was actually in production that you could talk about.
TK: No, because these things take forever; the pace is glacial. Some studios like Disney, they announce their slates well in advance, and we’ll probably announce this film I imagine before the end of the year. It comes out in 2018, and what I love about it is it’s so completely different from KUBO. Aesthetically, tonally, it’s a completely different story, and that’s really exciting. When we were still shooting KUBO, when we were finishing it, the other film was ramping up, and that’s the first time we’ve had two films in actual physical production at any given time. And so ultimately we do want to be on an annual release schedule. It’s really hard, but we want to get there because there are so many stories we want to tell, and you only have so much time on this planet, Steve, unfortunately—especially the way we make movies.
Capone: We haven’t even talked about the voice actors, but you have two Oscar-winning actors and three Oscar-nominated actors among your cast.
TK: It’s astonishing, yeah.
Capone: Are you getting to the point where you have people are coming to you asking to be in your films?
TK: It’s interesting, we began 10 years ago in a very inauspicious way. We were a bunch of anonymous misfits in Portland, the rain-drenched, patchouli-soaked armpit of the Pacific Northwest. And so when we started, nobody knew who we were; absolutely nobody knew who we were, so I still operate from that same assumption of people don’t know who we are. But people really do respond to the material. They love good material. These are actors who could do anything. They’re inundated with different projects that they could be involved in, so when they want to be a part of one of our films, it’s shocking to me, but I think they respond to the originality of it and the themes.
Charlize had never worked in animation before, Matthew had never worked in animation before, Rooney had never worked in animation before. So there was something about this story that resonated with them. They wanted to be involved. That’s amazing. You try to get the finest actors in the world, and sometimes some great actors don’t do great voice work. The ability to capture and convey all that range of human emotion using just your voice, very few actors can do it and do it well, and these guys are extraordinary, and they do a great job. Every single one of them does a great job.
Capone: Are you of a school where you tape them recording and try to incorporate that when you’re able to?
TK: You do to a degree. You video record them, and then when we’re doing the facial animation, we look for different things that they do with their face that are specific to the actor. Often times when you study live action, there are surprising things that you wouldn’t have thought of on your own, and we’re stylizing reality. We’re not replicating reality. It has a nodding acquaintance to reality, but when you look at say the way Art Parkinson, who voiced Kubo, when you look at the way he sets his jaw when he says a line, or the way he contorts his face when he’s angry, that’s interesting fodder for the facial animator that they can use to manipulate and inspires them to do something. It’s all in an effort to make sure that they all feel unique, that they have idiosyncratic qualities, and when you look at what the actual actor does, and you fuse that with their stylized proxy, you can get some really great performances.
Capone: As great as Charlize and Matthew are, Rooney is the secret weapon here, because those sisters are terrifying. I recognized that ghostly image from classic Japanese ghost stories, and the only thing worse than having one of those ghosts is having two of them.
TK: They’re great, and she is great, and she is absolutely terrifying, I agree.
Capone: Thank you so much. Best of luck with this, seriously.
