A new exhibition exploring the design and production of LAIKA’s new stop-motion film Wildwood opens at the Design Museum this October

LAIKA presents Wildwood: The Exhibition at the Design Museum, London, opening on October 15, 2026.

The Design Museum have announced LAIKA presents Wildwood: The Exhibition, a new exhibition created in collaboration with Portland-based stop-motion animation studio LAIKA, exploring the design and making of their forthcoming film Wildwood.

Opening on October 15 2026, the exhibition will coincide with the international release of LAIKA’s latest stop-motion adventure, Wildwood, directed by Travis Knight, offering visitors a rare opportunity to discover the film’s creative journey as it arrives on screen. After 20 years of masterminding animated cinematic classics, including Coraline (2009), ParaNorman (2012) and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016), the film showcases two decades of the studio’s groundbreaking approach to stop-motion filmmaking.

The exhibition will offer visitors a behind-the-scenes look at the creative and technical processes involved in building a stop- motion world. It brings together original creative material, production objects, costumes, filmmaking tools, audiovisual content and interactive installations, and will reveal the work of the visual development artists, model makers, scenic painters, and more.

Focusing on Wildwood, the exhibition will trace the film’s development from early ideas and visual research through character and environmental design, costume, puppet fabrication, rapid prototyping, miniature set construction, animation, and cinematography.

LAIKA’s films are created by stop motion, the cinematic practice of photographing real, three-dimensional objects in constructed environments, with puppets moved incrementally between frames. The exhibition will examine how handcraft and technology work together throughout the process, from intricate costumes and mechanical armatures to miniature sets, animation rigs, and lighting and camera techniques.

It will also present stop-motion as a multidisciplinary design practice, demonstrating how storytelling emerges through collaboration across design, engineering, making and technology. By revealing the breadth of careers involved in bringing a stop-motion feature to life, the exhibition also aims to inspire future generations to see animation not only as an art form, but as a viable and rewarding creative career path.

LAIKA’s exhibition will begin with a free-to-visit introduction on the museum’s mezzanine, situating Wildwood within LAIKA’s wider history and exploring the relationship between handcraft and technological innovation across two decades of filmmaking. This display will include objects from LAIKA’s earlier BAFTA- and Academy Award-nominated films, behind-the-scenes photography and early concept art.

On entering the main exhibition space, visitors can experience a captivating large-scale installation inspired by the Impassable Wilderness of Wildwood as seen in the film, creating a transition from the museum into the Wildwood cinematic universe.

The exhibition will take visitors behind the scenes of each stage of production, revealing the creative journey from early ideas and experimentation to finished puppets, environments, and sets as they appear on-screen. Visitors will explore techniques, materials and processes from LAIKA’s dedicated teams, including Puppet Fabrication, Animation, Stop Motion Rigging, Lighting, Camera and Visual Effects. Early visual development sketches, concept paintings and development material will reveal how the visual world of Wildwood took shape, drawing on the landscapes surrounding Portland, Oregon. Further displays will explore how characters, animals, costumes, architecture and environments were developed as parts of a coherent fictional ecosystem.

Wildwood will be released by Black Bear in UK and Irish cinemas on October 23.