Travis Knight
Travis Knight is a director, born 1973.
Two things are true about him at once, and the second matters more. He is the son of Nike's co-founder, and he is a stop-motion animator who worked up to lead animator at Laika before becoming the studio's chief executive and then directing its films. Animators who move into directing tend to understand the physical labour of a shot better than anyone else on the crew, and it shows in how his films are staged.
Kubo and the Two Strings, in 2016, was the directing debut and it remains the clearest statement of what he is after: stop motion used for scale and awe rather than for whimsy, attached to a story that treats grief as its actual subject. Two years later he took Bumblebee, a live-action Transformers film, and made the smallest and warmest entry in that series, essentially a girl-and-her-robot picture with the franchise's usual noise turned down. Choosing intimacy inside a machine that expensive is a real decision, and it worked.
He holds three Academy Award nominations. The listings here carry two films dated 2026: Wildwood, which returns him to Laika and the format he came up in, and a live-action Masters of the Universe, which does not. That pairing is the whole career in miniature, one for the craft and one for the scale.
Movies (4)
Where to start with Travis Knight
Take Kubo and the Two Strings first, without hesitation. It is the film that shows what he actually values, and the craft in it is visible in every shot without ever becoming the point of the exercise.
Then Bumblebee, the friendliest possible way into a franchise that had spent a decade being exhausting, and one that works perfectly well if you have seen none of the others. After that the page turns to the future: Wildwood is the return to Laika and to stop motion, and Masters of the Universe is the big live-action swing. Both are listed for 2026, so there is nothing to watch yet, only a choice to judge him by later.