[Ad- gifted experience] Amelia is a big fan of Coraline, the first movie created by LAIKA, so we were both very excited to go to LAIKA presents Wildwood: The Exhibition at The Design Museum London. I work with the Roblox game Coraline, which has been having a lot of Wildwood updates, so I had actually seen the Wildwood movie several times, at several different stages of completion. Seeing the movie and then seeing the exhibition was truly a unique and fantastic experience!
The LAIKA presents Wildwood: The Exhibition is a smaller exhibition inside the museum. Before you go to this ticketed area, there is a little floor that features a timeline of all of the movies that LAIKA has created. Amelia really enjoyed seeing Coraline in full, along with a small collection of the different faces that are used in the animations. We have seen several of the other LAIKA movies; The Boxtrolls, Missing Link, and ParaNorman were very interesting to see – and it reminded me that we still need to see Kubo and the Two Strings. It is also very nice that they have this timeline in the free to access area, as a nod to LAIKA.
Inside the LAIKA presents Wildwood: The Exhibition, everything is all about the new movie Wildwood, as one would expect. Wildwood has been worked on for the last 15 years, with over 10,000 people working on the film. Inside the exhibition, you can see several of the different stop-motion elements to the movie, from work-in-progress items that were used in the development of the filming to full scenes that were used in the movie. It’s so great to have seen these close up, in great detail, and with fantastic lighting.
Amelia and I both took our time walking around and seeing all of the different puppets and characters. I really loved the main vine wrapped middle section, which showed a very dramatic point in the film. Amelia loved the smaller food stalls, which were so realistic! It is a smaller exhibition, but there are plenty of videos to watch about the process and hear about how 3D printing has changed the way that these puppets are created. It’s really interesting especially if you like this sort of animation.
We also stopped in the cafe on our way out, where we ate a Button Eyes cupcake, inspired by Coraline, which wasn’t too sweet. It’s a blueberry cupcake base, with some white chocolate eyes and some berries on top – a great way to end your LAIKA inspired experience. There are also plenty of LAIKA and even Coraline specific items in the giftshop.
You can check out our other Days Out to see what else we’ve been up too!