How the Father of Claymation Lost His Company | Hacker News Reader

How the Father of Claymation Lost His Company

priceonomics.com

119 pointsbenjaminfox18 comments

I expected the story to end with, "And then the billionaire's son ran the company into the ground," but it didn't.

Still, I'm skeptical to credit Travis Knight with "saving" the studio. The money and nepotism definitely rescued the studio as a profit-making enterprise.

But if the same artists had worked on the same Coraline with someone else's capital, would the outcome have been any different? Probably not. Did it matter if the money was branded Knight or someone else's?

The wrongest takeaway would be to credit Laika's new management with being anything more than turnaround artists (as opposed to film artists). Vinton was a creative visionary and always will be, money in the bank or not.

Vinton should have known what he was getting into when he took Knight's money. Of course the objective was to acquire (or in this case, inherit) Vinton's creative vision and make it Travis Knight's.

It is remarkable that Travis, through nothing more than the luck of being born who he is, manages to obtain these intangibles: Vinton's identity as an artist composed of his studio and his work.

>The wrongest takeaway would be to credit Laika's new management with being anything more than turnaround artists (as opposed to film artists). Vinton was a creative visionary and always will be, money in the bank or not.

To be fair, from the article it reads like the studio was basically gutted to the core and rebuilt from scratch. They took a struggling but quirky visionary company, razed it (after it had already shrunk to less than 20% of what it had been at its peak), and turned it into what is basically a traditional Disney-style Hollywood-oriented animation studio (big movies, big budgets, big merchandise). They even dropped the original name. One has to wonder: what did Travis Knight actually keep from Vinton's old enterprise?

For the record, a huge factor in Coraline's success was its origin as a celebrated, prize-winning book from a celebrated, prize-winning literary and pop-culture demigod (Neil Gaiman) arguably at the peak of his career. Sure, adaptation and animation were good, but it wasn't exactly the hardest assignment to begin with.

>It is remarkable that Travis, through nothing more than the luck of being born who he is, manages to obtain these intangibles

Yeah, but social classes don't exist in America, right? Eh.

For whatever it's worth, ParaNorman totally blew my socks off in terms of being a completely non-obvious story telling approach from just about every aspect. The final sequence of the film is simultaneously terrifying and heartbreaking. They did some god damned good work on that film and on Coraline and for whatever insane backstabbing route that it came from, they are hiring people who are insanely creative storytellers in terms of writing and visual direction.

Which brings up the question: what's the point of keeping the original company? You're unlikely to have as much equity in a company with so much history as opposed to if you were to found a new company.

This reminds me somewhat of Warren Buffet's biggest mistake, which was that he had made a lousy investment into a Textile-manufacturing company called Berkshire Hathaway. Having a disagreement with its CEO; he acquired a majority stake of the company, and fired its CEO out of spite. But he couldn't get all the stock; and when he completely reshaped the company into what it is today, half of the value he created ended up going to the company's original stockholders, instead of himself as it would have, had he started from scratch with his own company.

The original company has a known brand (Vinton), and that opens doors.

No, it changed the name to Laika.

Nike, arguably, is a bigger and more door-opening brand than Vinton.

In the world of Claymation, what does an athletic shoe company know?

"But if the same artists had worked on the same Coraline with someone else's capital, would the outcome have been any different? Probably not. Did it matter if the money was branded Knight or someone else's?"

this section of the article says yes, it would have been different:

"'Max,' an animator who’d been laid off from Vinton Studios, later became a freelancer and found himself back at Laika to work on Coraline. “It was a wonderful project to be involved in,” he says, “but I’ve had better experiences.” He’d been excited to work with Sellick, one of his heroes, but found that animators were treated poorly by management. 'There was a ‘Just Do It’ attitude. It was a beautiful experience, but rough for a lot of people.'"

You can't really have it both ways. If you expected the studio to have failed due to Travis Knight's leadership, then you have to credit him with it not failing. You can't set up predictions in which one result confirms you but the opposite result means you don't have to update your assumptions. That would be the equivalent of a free lunch and/or perpetual motion machine.

Travis Knight is interesting. He's been spoiled all his life, yet he became a highly-competent animator relatively quickly – and this can be verified from other articles. He’s likely highly-intelligent but not extraordinarily so. Some species of smart people pretend to be stupid, though not often this stupid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WU9jq990b-w / I’ve been watching videos of him for that last few minutes, I wonder if he's something of a Zelig-like figure. Strange specimen, I’d be interested in meeting him.

I agree - he is very interesting. Maybe he just took a long time to find himself. From your comment, I watched a few short interviews and he seems very bright.

The early rap career was kind of cringe-worthy, but he also lived a good deal of his life in public. I bet a lot of people would be in the same boat if they had billionaire fathers who supported their decisions. I found his father's support sweet.

Seriously ? How taking company from another person , firing him is interesting ? Did you even read the article ? Typical millionaire/billionaire behavior. Steal the idea or acquire the company -> separate out founder -> fire them ->profit. If this is interesting I dont know what to say.

>How taking company from another person, firing him is interesting

I'm not an apologist for the top .001%, but Vinton brought this mostly on himself. He tried expanding beyond his business capabilities and failed. It's not like this was a hostile takeover by Knight. The company would have gone bankrupt and had its assets sold off if Knight didn't take over.

Maybe it would have been benevolent to keep Vinton around. But Knight didn't act particularly unethical. It was selfish, but people act in their own interest all the time. And I suppose it was Nepotism, but at least he made his kid start out at the bottom. And clearly his kid has some talent because he's somewhat turned the company around even if it came at the cost of an open and artistic culture.

If you want to paint this story as the sterotypical billionaire being evil then go for it. But I think that shows the shallowness of your thoughts than ours.

He doesn't sound so stupid to me, especially relative to his age. How smart and wise were you as a teenager? (Not sure how old he is in that video, but he looks something like 18)?

I don't think he's stupid, but he was subconsciously pretending to be. I think maybe wealth can interfere with identity formation. When you can purchase an identity as a kid, you become something of a cypher for awhile. Maybe he was a nerd that tried to purchase cool. I don't know, but it's interesting how someone so smart can lack self awareness (even as a teenager) to the degree displayed in the video.

I've got a lot of respect for the guy. He was the director of animation on two excellent, Pixar-level films. He's obviously super talented.

Everything happens for a raisin.

Excellent read. I usually don't have the patience to read longer pieces, but this was a great story.

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