The Knights' Tale

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Power Couple: Phil Knight relies on a mix of outsiders and insiders to make Laika work. (“Not exactly textbook,” he laughs.) Here, CEO and Nike alum Dale Wahl (left) and director Selick, on set.

The shoes were black, hard, and tight, and Travis Knight squeezed into them as if this were day one of military school. He was wearing a suit, too--his only suit--for the first time in who knew how long. Usually, he showed up for work in jeans, a T-shirt, and his lucky Doc Martens. But in fall 2002, he was starting a new job, one he'd never considered and certainly never pursued.

He was terrified.

Up until then, Travis had been just another young, obsessive animator at Will Vinton Studios in Portland, Oregon. He spent his days mostly alone, posing his delicate puppets or creating computer graphics for ads and a short-lived TV series, hoping for another show, maybe his first film. A humble life near the bottom of the ladder. Today that would change. Travis was taking a seat on Vinton's board of directors, a body he'd always thought of as some kind of secret society. He was 29, with no experience as a manager and only four years as an animator, his first real job. Ever.

To make it all even more complicated, at the meeting he would also step into a second role he'd never expected: the boss's son. "I was freaked out," Travis recalls. "These worlds were colliding."

This was Phil's idea. That's what Travis calls his father. Phil. Same as everyone else. Travis never wanted to draw attention to the fact that his father was the man who swooshified the globe. He hated reinforcing the notion that he was born with silver Nikes on his feet. Even though, well, he was.

Phil Knight is one of the world's wealthiest people, but he's also a parent. He worries, meddles, backs off, meddles some more. He had hoped his two sons, Matthew and Travis, would come to work for the empire he had started in the 1960s by selling sneakers out of the trunk of his car. Maybe they would even run it one day, he thought. But they weren't interested. "They made that very clear from the beginning," he says.

A man like Phil can buy alternatives, however. After the advertising market plummeted following September 11, with Vinton Studios near bankruptcy, Phil dipped into his billions and saved the company. And Travis's job. Now the largest shareholder, Phil asked his son and a couple of Nike veterans to join the board of directors. Travis was relieved about Vinton, but uneasy about his new role. Not only was he now the boss's son, he was about to become his bosses' boss, whatever that meant. He feared what must be going through their heads: What the hell does this kid know?

The board met in a conference room at Vinton. There was Will Vinton himself, with his handlebar mustache, the creative genius who'd put the studio on the map in the 1980s with the California Raisins. (He'd be gone in a matter of months.) There was Phil, the new chairman of the board. And there was Travis, the youngest and quietest director, taking it all in, feet throbbing in his shoes.

"I said yes," Travis says of Phil's request to join the board. "But I didn't know what it meant."

Five years have brought great change to the Knight family: Phil is no longer Nike's CEO. Travis the animator is finding his inner executive. And both have suffered the death of Matthew in 2004, which has only tied them more tightly to the new family business.

Laika, as Vinton is now known, has grown to nearly 400 people--animators, model makers, set builders, puppet engineers, riggers. If the Knights have their way, they are creating not only the company's first movie, Coraline, slated for release next year, but the next great animation studio. Period.

With that immodest goal in mind, they have lured away veterans of Pixar, Disney, and DreamWorks. They're designing a $55 million, 30-acre campus, complete with a fitness center and 300-seat theater, conceived by the architect of the nearby Nike campus. They're dropping no less than $50 million on their very first picture, with another of the same scale waiting in the wings. They're using two radically different forms of animation, which is almost unheard of. Phil's commitment to date: $180 million.

At Laika (pronounced LIKE-uh), Phil has made other moves that will one day be seen as either the bold improvisations of a maverick or the naive missteps of a sneaker mogul out of his element. He brought in Dale Wahl, a former Nike exec with zero experience in the film business, as CEO. ("I told Phil I wouldn't know Finding Nemo if it hit me in the face," Wahl says.) Phil hired Henry Selick--a man whose work he still hasn't seen but who is one of Travis's animation heroes--to be supervising director, even though Selick's box office falls with every film he directs (he has never come close to matching his biggest success--The Nightmare Before Christmas, back in 1993). Phil also kept the commercial division, Laika House, a rarity in animation (the film division is Laika Entertainment).