Wildwood Art Director Matthew Maldonado On Why Laika Still Builds Everything By Hand And Why Theyre Coming To Londons Design Musuem

Creative Boom: Matthew Maldonado on why LAIKA made everything by hand for new film Wildwood The stop-motion studio behind Coraline, The Boxtrolls and Kubo and the Two Strings is bringing its puppets and sets to London. Its art director explains how and why they were made. Remember when the words "badly animated" used to mean something? These days, the same phrase is flung around on social media with abandon, but honestly, even the cheapest cartoons look pretty slick and well put together to me. Digital animation software is so powerful now that you no longer need to spend decades skilling up before you can produce something that looks decent.

The downside, though, is that most things increasingly look the same. But here's one very big exception. Founded in 2005 and based just outside Portland, LAIKA crafts its animated films not from pixels on a screen, but from real, physical puppets on real, physical sets. They move them by hand, a fraction at a time, and photograph them one frame at a time. It's slow, tedious, painstaking work, but it's won them huge critical acclaim.

All five of its features so far (Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings and Missing Link) have been nominated for best animated feature. Enter Wildwood Now, LAIKA's sixth movie is on the way. Directed by Travis Knight, Wildwood follows a teenager called Prue who ventures into a hidden magical forest to rescue her baby brother, who's been snatched by crows. At 132 minutes, it's the longest stop-motion film ever made, using an astonishing 231 puppets across 136 physical sets. Brits are also getting the chance to see some of those props in real life, at Wildwood: The Exhibition at the Design Museum in Kensington, London.

This will be a rare chance to view puppets, armatures, costumes, sets, tools and concept art, with a free complementary display on the mezzanine covering LAIKA's 20-year history. The man tasked with putting the show together was art director Matthew Maldonado, having spent five years designing and building Wildwood's sets. So I asked him the million dollar question: how much of Wildwood is physical and how much is digital? Matthew's response is simple. "Every single thing was made by hand, truly," he stresses. "And every single thing that we built was either shot in camera or referenced by our effects department.

We've got some really wide, expansive locations and there's some digital aspect to all of that. But if it wasn't on camera, on stage, it's a scanned asset or a reference asset, specifically made by the artisans in the art department." That extends to things you'd never expect to be constructed physically.

For instance, LAIKA's rapid prototyping team, known for 3D printing thousands of puppet faces, also helped the set department animate Portland's famous Benson Bubbler drinking fountains, using replacement parts to cycle the water frame by frame. Hometown challenge Wildwood is LAIKA's first film set in its hometown, and that brought its own unique challenges. One of Matthew's first sets, back in 2021 (these movies take a long time to make), was Portland's Waterfront Park: an outdoor location with a river, buildings, concrete walls and a boat splashing past.

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