Travis Knight

Travis Knight's habit is to pick up something ridiculous and decline to hold it at arm's length. A Transformers spin-off, a toy line from the 1980s, a stop-motion fantasy: he approaches each as if it were a proper story with a proper person at the centre, and he storyboards the robots and the monsters with the same care he gives the quiet scenes. His own account of Masters of the Universe is the neatest summary of the method: "We take it sincerely – even when we're doing something that is objectively silly." When that holds, his spectacle is unusually easy to follow. You know where everyone is and what they want.

The route here was odd. He rapped under the name Chilly Tee in the early 1990s, then joined the Portland studio that became Laika, working as lead animator and producer on Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls before running the place. He directed his first film, the stop-motion Kubo and the Two Strings, in 2016, and made his live-action debut with Bumblebee in 2018. In 2026 he released two films at once: the live-action Masters of the Universe and the stop-motion Wildwood, from the Colin Meloy novel. The writer Chris Butler has been with him on three of these and the producer Arianne Sutner on four, which suggests a director who likes a settled crew.

The sincerity is the strength and the test. Kubo is a large fantasy that never loses the boy inside it. Bumblebee took an old property and played it warm, small and sincere, and it did not need to keep telling us it knew what it was. Masters of the Universe cannot manage that. The cast is bright and Jared Leto's Skeletor is worth the evening, but the script cannot decide whether it is in on the joke or is the joke, and it nudges us in the ribs in almost every scene. We went in hoping for the Bumblebee trick and came out tired: somewhere past the ninety-minute mark of its 141 we stopped laughing at the reminders and started counting them. A film that trusts its own silliness does not need to keep confessing it.

So the question for Knight is whether the winking was his idea or the property's. His record says the property's. Wildwood puts him back in stop-motion, the medium he came up in and the one he has spent a career trying to push further, and it is Laika's most ambitious production yet. It is also a medium in which every frame is placed by hand and there is no time to nudge anyone. That may be exactly where he belongs.