TRAVIS KNIGHT

I think there's an unfortunate thing where a lot of content geared towards kids and families is watered down, dumbed down.

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.

When I became a father, I saw what passed for family entertainment. So much of it was vapid. I wanted to make things that mattered.

Historically, stop-motion animation has had a jerky-jerky quality, which is a constant reminder to audiences that they're looking at artificial objects. It creates a barrier between the audience having an emotional experience and what they're looking at. We're working hard to get past that.

We used to go to movies to see stories about ourselves. It would transport us to new worlds and we'd see aspects of ourselves reflected back.

When you allow an animator to focus on a portion of the film and really understand the arc of the scene, what's happening with the characters, they can make choices all along the way that reinforce the main points of the scene. They really get to know what's happening.

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

I think the Knight boys have a long history of disappointing their fathers.

The executive side of you always wants to find the best, most efficient way to do things. Of course, art is extraordinarily inefficient.

Artists are neurotic and hypersensitive, and they tend to focus on granular details, sometimes at the expense of the big picture. I've gotten better at the big picture over the years.

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

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.

We use technology in service of the art, as a storytelling tool - and if we want to do something that's never been done we have to invent the technology. 'ParaNorman' represents the realization of stop-motion's potential.

In any piece of art, the artist pours themselves into it. It becomes a reflection of who they are and what they believe. That's what it has to be. Otherwise it's just a product.

We respect that children are smart, sophisticated and can handle things that adults typically don't think they can.

When we started on 'Coraline,' there was a whole host of things that we had no idea how we were going to do. Because we were making films in a way that had never really been done before, we were taking this hundred-year-old art form and bringing it into a new era by embracing technology and innovation.

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.

I'm a child of the '80s.

I just love what art can do and what it means for us; that it can cross barriers. It can speak to us across space and time and culture.

You only have so much time on this planet.

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.

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

No TV show has meant more to me than 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'

From all the iterations, Bumblebee has been the Transformer with the most connection to people.

We live in world that wants to burnish the rough edges and straighten the crooked line, but conformity doesn't beget greatness.