Wildwood, LAIKA’s Forest of 136 Handcrafted Sets Turned into an Exhibition

LAIKA’s stop-motion feature Wildwood follows Prue as she enters a hidden forest to rescue her abducted baby brother. A Design Museum exhibition presents the film’s sketches, puppets, costumes, props,

LAIKA’s stop-motion feature *Wildwood* follows Prue, a girl who ventures into the “Impassable Wilderness” to rescue her baby brother after he is taken by a murder of crows. Directed by Travis Knight, the film opened theatrically in the United States on October 23, 2026, and was also released in UK cinemas on the same day. The London Design Museum’s LAIKA presents WILDWOOD: The Exhibition offers an up-close look at the physical creations made before the film reached the screen.

From Sketches to Shooting Sets

The exhibition follows the process from early sketches and visual research through character and environment design, costume work, puppet fabrication, rapid prototyping, miniature set construction, animation, and filming. In stop-motion, characters and spaces do not remain merely as models inside a computer. The puppets’ joints and costumes, props, and miniature sets placed under the lights all become physical subjects for filming, and the exhibition reveals how these stages of production combine to create a single image.

Encountering Parts of 136 Sets

A total of 136 sets were built for *Wildwood*, and the exhibition includes some of them along with puppets, costumes, tools, and concept art. The exhibition runs at the London Design Museum from October 15, 2026, through January 10, 2027. Rather than simply explaining the film’s fantasy world, it specifically shows how model makers, background painters, animators, and camera and visual-effects departments connect real materials and techniques.

LAIKA’s Sixth Feature

Following *Coraline*, *ParaNorman*, *The Boxtrolls*, *Kubo and the Two Strings*, and *Missing Link*, LAIKA presents *Wildwood*. The voice cast includes Peyton Elizabeth Lee as Prue and Jacob Tremblay as Curtis, along with Carey Mulligan, Mahershala Ali, and Angela Bassett. Instead of emphasizing the finished scenes’ fantastical quality, the exhibition conveys through concrete production assets that those scenes are built from countless small objects and frame-by-frame choices.