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.

"Basically, it broke his heart," Phil recalls. William Knight, a prominent Portland lawyer turned newspaper publisher, envisioned a nice stable career as a CPA for his son. He was old school. "I can almost never remember him giving me a compliment," Phil says. "It was, 'You can do better.'"

Phil was different. He told his rapping son, "Why not try it?" Travis asked a family friend to pass his demo on to MCA Records, a major label, and soon he had himself a deal. Keith Shocklee, the former Public Enemy producer assigned to make the CD, said Travis had talent, but his family name didn't go unnoticed: "I was told, 'This is Phil Knight's son. Show him how it's done.'"

Travis, just 17, moved to New York, and on the advice of his managers, became Chilly Tee. For six months, he lived out of his parents' Manhattan apartment and rapped about being misunderstood ("Krisis of Identity") and about getting pushed to be something he wasn't ("Get Off Mine"). Chilly resisted the advice to milk his Nike roots--for the most part. The last cut on the disc: "Just Do It."

But the CD tanked, and the proposed tour never happened. Disillusioned, Travis enrolled at Portland State University, close to home but a long way from Stanford.

To this day, Chilly Tee's father keeps the CD on his iPod. His favorite song is "Get Off Mine," the title track. "I like the attitude," he says.

A father can push. He can open doors. But once the son passes through, he's still left to walk on his own. After Travis graduated, Phil suggested a series of internships in Portland. He made some calls. Will Vinton Studios was the first and last stop. Back in 1998, the company was cranking out episodes of The PJs, an animated Fox series with Eddie Murphy. Production was unrelenting, and one of the directors let Travis pitch in. Before long, despite his lack of formal training, he was promoted to full-time animator. "He's a natural," says Mary Sandell, now a Coraline producer, who hired him at Vinton. "I'm not just saying that."

Travis discovered his own "insane, all-consuming passion" for breathing life into the foam-and-metal dolls. And he realized he had the almost bottomless patience it required. Stop-motion is created frame by frame, 24 frames per second of film. "Two or three seconds of animation is a good day," he says. (For his part, Phil says, "I wouldn't have the patience.")

By 2002, Vinton's two TV shows had been canceled. Its ad work was vanishing. The company had too many employees, too little cash, and mounting debt. Phil, who had invested $5 million to help the company expand during its PJs heyday, deliberated for a week about intervening. Saving Vinton "was going to take a pretty good investment," he says. But it came down to more than money. One of his biggest regrets, he often tells business-school classes, was being away from his family while building Nike. By this point, Matthew was off doing his own thing, raising money for orphanages in El Salvador. "If I don't do it, [Vinton] fails, and Travis goes to work for some other animation place," Phil says. "Probably in L.A."

Of course, it wasn't that easy. When Phil did step in, Travis got a stark lesson in corporate Darwinism. Will Vinton, the chairman at the time, didn't realize that Phil, as part of his original investment (15% ownership), had included a clause allowing himself to assume control of the board in the event of significant losses. "I was naive," Vinton says. "Definitely naive." A few years earlier, his stock had been worth more than $20 million; six months later, he was fired from the company he'd founded and given $125,000 in severance. Devastated, he sued Phil and the new board members, including Travis, saying he'd been unfairly forced out. It was all part of Phil's plan, Vinton charged, to hand over the studio to "his child." A judge dismissed the suit.

"Dark times" is how Travis describes his initiation into the brutality of business. It looked like the low point, but it wasn't. Not even close.

In May 2004, two years after Phil bought Vinton, Matthew traveled to El Salvador for Christian Children of the World, a Portland nonprofit. He was shooting a fund-raising video and helping acquire two houses for orphanages, one for boys, one for girls. He visited the country several times a year, often enough for the kids to call him Tío ("uncle") Matthew. This would be his last trip. While scuba diving with colleagues in Lake Ilopango, near San Salvador, he suffered a heart attack 65 feet underwater and died instantly. He was 34.

Travis, who accompanied his father to El Salvador to bring his brother's body home, regrets that he and Matthew had drifted apart as adults. "That's why Jack and Ben is so important to me," Travis says, referring to Laika's second film. He won't say much else about the movie because it's still in development, but the relationship between the two protagonists is clear.