The
wonderland of Laika
By Christina
Williams
Artsy jobs, beaucoup bucks and an ambitious vision. Phil
Knight’s animation operation is one cool boost to
Oregon’s fledgling movie industry.
When Phil Knight announced last year that he was rechristening
his animation studio with the name Laika and trotted out plans
for two feature-length movies, it was easy to dismiss the
far-off distribution dates as pie in the sky.
But word this summer that Knight will pump millions of dollars
into a state-of-the-art movie-making campus south of Portland
makes it crystal clear that the man who took Nike from waffle
irons to $21 billion isn’t merely dabbling in movie
making. He’s playing to win.
Knight, Nike’s notoriously shy chairman, plays down the
sizable investment the campus will require him to make even
before the studio’s first movies hit the box office.
“The property bought to be Laika’s headquarters
will, I am confident, increase in value over the years,”
says Knight, in an e-mail response to questions. The campus is
essential to Laika’s strategy of becoming a major force
in the global animation industry.
Before ground is even broken early next year at the 30-acre
campus site in Tualatin, the two movies in production at Laika
will move parts of the company into temporary digs in the
Portland area and the company will go on a hiring tear,
bringing on several hundred creative workers who will shoulder
the burden of getting Laika’s first films from the
drawing board to the silver screen.
What started as juicy ego-clash story about Knight’s
battle with the animation studio’s founder, Will Vinton,
has evolved into one of the sexier business development
opportunities to come Oregon’s way in some time. Between
the big-name talent already imported to Portland and a
financial backer with deep pockets and a strong commitment,
Laika is positioned to make a name for itself, and its home
state, in the world of animated movies.
MANY STILL LINK LAIKA, named for the 1950s-era Russian space
dog, to its past as Will Vinton Studios and a troop of Marvin
Gaye-singing, high-stepping raisins with attitude (see
timeline, p.30). The studio has been in the headlines in recent
years but mostly because of the power struggle between Knight,
who became the largest shareholder of the near-bankrupt company
in 2002, and founder Vinton, who was ousted in 2003.
But members of the new Laika regime don’t give much
thought to the studio’s past.
“I think of this as a new company,” says Jorgen
Klubien, his chin jutting when someone evokes the Vinton name.
“It’s always exciting to work for a new place.
There’s a willingness to do something
different.”
Klubien, whose work appeared in Monsters Inc., Toy Story 2, A Bug’s
Life and this summer’s Pixar film Cars, is bustling around a
third-floor studio in Laika’s low-profile headquarters on
Portland’s Northwest 22nd Avenue in jeans and a pullover,
talking about his latest project: Jack and Ben’s Animated
Adventure. He’s been working on it for more than a
year already, which is no time at all in the animation world,
and the plot is still being tinkered with. It’s there on
the wall where it can be physically rearranged: cards with
spare sentences, colorful sketches. Around the corner, artists
are rendering and re-rendering the characters, trying to hit
the right level of what Klubien calls
“cartooniness.” Every detail is drawn on paper and
the two-dimensional sketches pave the way for the
three-dimensional computer-generated effects that will make up
the final product.
A few blocks away, Henry Selick’s walls are plastered
with similar work, but — without revealing the creative
details that visitors are required to keep under wraps —
very different characters. There are notes about costumes,
fabric samples and on a table, eggshell-hued models of
three-dimensional characters with bulging eyes stand waiting
for life. Selick made a name for himself directing The Nightmare Before Christmas and
James and the Giant
Peach. He’s now hard at work on Coraline, a film based on the
children’s book by Neil Gaiman, a project Selick brought
with him to Portland. In May, Laika landed a domestic and
international distribution deal for Coraline with Focus Features, the
studio behind Brokeback
Mountain.
Selick enthuses about the characters and the casting. Dakota
Fanning has been locked as the lead since October as the voice
of Coraline. The comedy duo Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders,
the women behind the BBC hit Absolutely Fabulous, were signed
in June to voice Coraline’s eccentric downstairs
neighbors. Teri Hatcher will be the voice of Coraline’s
mother and the Other Mother.
The movie will be a stop-motion animation film, in the style
of the recent Wallace &
Gromit Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Tim Burton’s
Corpse Bride, on which
Laika shares production credit. But Selick talks up the ways
his team will use computer-generated imagery (CGI) animation in
combination with stop-motion to better animate the
characters’ facial expressions and to add special effects
to the film. When the film goes into full production sometime
later this year, there will be as many as 18 stages with puppet
characters laboriously acting out each scene. Selick will use a
new 3-D filming technique, a first, he says, for stop-motion
animated film.
For Selick, the biggest creative name to grace the company
roster, animation isn’t a movie genre, it’s a tool
for storytelling. He wants to make animated movies that cover
new ground, and in his mind Laika is a place where being
creatively bold will pay off — both in the race for
box-office cash and in the competition for top talent in the
animation world.
RUNNING THE SHOW AT LAIKA is Dale Wahl, a former Nike
executive who was named CEO by Knight last fall. His language
is peppered with references to the fine line Laika aims to walk
between economic feasibility and a quality movie-making
operation.
Wahl, who looks the part of a Nike alum with close-cropped
gray hair, a golf vest and a yellow Live Strong bracelet, was
called out of semi-retirement to lead Laika after serving as a
consultant to Portland-based Oh! Shoes and CFO to Metro One
Communications. He left Nike in 1998. “It’s been a
vertical learning curve situation,” Wahl says of his
tenure at Laika. “I haven’t spent much time
worrying. It’s too early for much to go wrong.”
Wahl’s Laika has two distinct divisions. Laika/house,
which has about 100 employees (including administrative
positions that serve both divisions), focuses on making
television commercials that feature both stop-motion and CGI
animation such as the cheeky animated M&M candies, a blue
mouse for British car insurer Esure and an award-winning spot
done last year for ESPN about fan loyalty.
House is led by division president Lourrie Hammack, a six-year
veteran of the company. While the commercial division has the
closest ties to the company’s past as Will Vinton
Studios, Hammack says being reborn as Laika has had a
rejuvenating effect on the business. “We’re the
busiest we’ve been in years,” Hammack says.
The new division is Laika Entertainment, the movie-making arm
of the business, which started the summer with about 85
employees but is expected to swell to between 400 and 500 in
the next year or two as movie production ramps up. Unlike
Laika/house, which brings in money, Entertainment is a
veritable sinkhole for cash as each movie costs between $50
million and $70 million up front with any return several years
out (the target release date for Coraline is sometime in 2008,
while Jack and Ben is
aiming at 2009).
Right now, the entertainment division leans heavily on
Laika/house for talent, but Wahl expects that to seesaw over
time as artists are freed up between movies to help on
commercials.
Dan Philips, VP and head of production, started with the
company in January. An industry pro whose career includes
stints at DreamWorks and Disney along with DKP Studios and the
Big Idea Company, he’s one of a team of executives being
gradually installed around Wahl, who readily admits neophyte
status in the movie business.
Philips is in charge of making sure the producers and
directors have what they need to make their movies: time,
people and money. Long charts on his wall track the positions
Laika will fill, with short yellow lines representing the time
it will take to recruit and longer blue lines the length of
time they’ll be needed on the project. To be successful
for the long haul, Laika will need a pipeline of projects to
keep employees busy.
“We’re going to hire everyone we can from this
area who has some level of experience,” Philips says.
“It’s not worth recruiting mid-level people from
far away.”
And when it comes to enticing top-tier talent to come to
Portland, Laika hasn’t had much trouble so far. Selick,
who has a theory he does better work the farther away from
Hollywood he is, points out that long, rainy winters are
conducive to the time requirements of animation. And Klubien
says Oregon’s weather reminds him of his home in
Denmark.
Steve Oster, executive director for the Oregon Film &
Video Office, says Laika will take advantage of state tax
incentives designed to lure movie production operations to come
to the state, including the Oregon Production Investment Fund,
which offers a 10% rebate on production costs of $1 million or
more up to $250,000, and a 6.2% rebate on payroll withholding
taxes.
“We’re always interested in working with local
employers,” Oster says. “Having them in town keeps
our workforce here employed.”
And for Portland, where talk of its creative class has almost
become cliché in repetition, 400 to 500 new, actual
creative jobs would be a welcome addition to the employment
base.
“I would see them becoming a major player,” says
Anne Mangan, who oversees the Portland Development
Commission’s relationship with creative services cluster
companies.
Mangan met with representatives from Laika several times over
the course of the year and worked to find the kind of land it
needed for its campus in the central city area, but to no
avail. The property in town all needed to have buildings taken
down before new ones could be built. “They seem to be on
kind of a fast track,” Mangan says.
Plans for the campus, announced in May, call for a
three-building, phase-one build-out to begin later this year
and open some time in 2009. Descriptions of the scheme echo
that of Nike’s corporate campus in Beaverton — a
fitness center is on the drawing board as part of Laika’s
main administrative building.
The campus will house cutting-edge technology and the
infrastructure to support it. The computers needed to render
animation have become bigger and more powerful over time so the
tricky part becomes managing their electricity consumption and
keeping them cool enough to get the maximum performance from
each machine.
For Laika employees, a young, casual bunch that favors perks
such as dogs in the office and being able to bike to work, the
commute to Tualatin will be a change of pace to say the least.
But developing a 30-acre campus with state-of-the-art
facilities is integral to Knight’s plan for Laika.
WITH OR WITHOUT A GLITZY CAMPUS, it’s Laika’s
movies that will have to stand out.
Pixar’s merger with Disney, a $7.4 billion stock deal
announced in January, has changed the market somewhat, but the
union of two giants hasn’t diminished the crowd of
animators hawking their wares at the box office.
At least a dozen CGI films are due out this year, more than
twice as many as last year. And as technology costs come down
for the sophisticated computers needed to create CGI animation,
that number could continue to climb.
“You have to develop stories, compelling stories,”
says Steve Lidberg, research analyst at Pacific Crest
Securities in Portland who follows the animated movie-making
business. “That becomes increasingly important as the
number of people targeting CGI grows.”
That message has come in loud and clear at Laika, where even
investor Phil Knight thinks enough about story that he attended
Robert McKee’s Story Seminar, a seminal course for
screenwriters that was featured in the 2002 movie Adaptation.
“What Phil really values is a good story,” says
Fiona Kenshole, the excitable Brit who Knight hired as director
of worldwide scouting operations for Laika. Kenshole, a former
children’s literature editor and publisher, is in charge
of finding the best stories for future Laika movies. She scored
a coup this spring by beating out DreamWorks for rights to the
book Here Be Monsters.
She finagled the deal by promising the author, Alan Snow, that
Laika directors would stay true to his vision and that
she’d throw in a pair of Nikes for his son.
Here Be Monsters is
now in development along with two other titles Kenshole brought
in, one by an Oregon author about the origins of Halloween and
another, a book called The
Wool and the Wing, that takes place in a version of
Manhattan where everyone can fly and features what Selick calls
“the funniest villains I’ve ever read.”
The ideal situation is to have four movies in various stages
of production at any one time. Building up the development
department — where a number of stories will be in the
works until they rise to the level of being green-lighted by
management — will be a key to that strategy.
While Knight has had a say in what projects are pursued by
Laika to date, he says he’s not interested in being a
day-to-day guy in the business. “It is a very creative
company rescued from insolvency,” Knight writes in an
e-mail. “I did the rescuing, but its success, while
important and possible, will be the legacy of the people who
work there full time.”
Knight first became involved with the company when his son,
Travis, got a job as an animator at Will Vinton Studios. The
younger Knight, who by all accounts is a strong artist, is
transitioning into more of a management role and holds a seat
on the studios’ board of directors. “One of the
side benefits of the Laika involvement is that it has allowed
me and Travis to be together more,” says Knight.
Ultimately, between the stiff competition, the novice
investor, the inexperienced CEO and an inherently risky
business, Laika will have anything but an easy ride to success,
but nobody involved seems very worried.
“We’re not trying to play catch-up,” Henry
Selick says. “Nobody can, for any amount of money, be the
next Pixar. It’s a ghost of the past.”
“I like to do things that are hard to impossible,”
says Philips, the industry gray hair. “All these
companies are risky. I’ve worked for two companies that
have gone bankrupt in the last decade and a half.”
And in a world where CGI studios are sprouting like weeds,
Laika plans to make a competitive advantage out of its ability
to do both stop-motion and CGI, combining the two where it
makes sense. Stop-motion animation is experiencing a resurgence
of sorts and Laika’s Vinton past strengthens its stature
in that arena.
In a decade, Wahl expects Laika to be building out its campus
and nurturing a flow of movies. “We’ll have the
reputation of ‘Who knows what they’re going
to do next,’” Wahl says.
However Laika’s reputation shakes out on the national
scene, Oregon will be keeping a close eye on its own
opportunity to add a movie-making success story to its business
repertoire.
A brief history
1974
Will Vinton wins first Academy Award for a short film, Closed Mondays, putting his
studio on the map.
1980s Vinton
becomes synonymous with “claymation,” the term he
coined, and the California Raisins, which his studio creates
for the California Raisin Board.
1998
Phil Knight makes his initial investment in Will Vinton Studios
and his son, Travis, starts work there as an animator.
1999
Vinton Studios staffs up to 400 employees for work on the
animated television series The PJs.
2002
Phil Knight becomes the majority shareholder of Vinton as the
studio teeters on the brink of bankruptcy.
2003
Vinton is laid off and a legal battle for the company ensues
with Knight coming out on top.
2004
Knight hires Henry Selick, director of Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas,
as supervising director with the intention of building up the
studio’s movie-making ability.
July
2005 Knight renames the studio Laika,
with two divisions. Laika/house makes commercials, such as the
award-winning spot for ESPN made in partnership with
Wieden+Kennedy about sports fan devotion. Laika Entertainment
makes movies, with two projects announced including Coraline, based on the Neil
Gaiman children’s book, and Jack and Ben’s Animated
Adventure.
October
2005 Laika announces Dakota Fanning
will be the voice of Coraline.
Summer
2006 Laika announces the purchase of
land in Tualatin, where it will construct a
state-of-the-art campus that will include a building devoted to
computer-generated graphics and another to stop-motion
animation. In the meantime, Laika will lease office space in
Portland to house its production team.
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