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>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.

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

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

No, it changed the name to Laika.

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.

"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.'"