Nelson Lowry has designed sets for LAIKA for years, and Wildwood still gave him problems he couldn’t solve on the first try. The new stop-motion animation from the studio behind Kubo and the Two Strings and Coraline has been a labour of love, taking seven years, with Lowry's team building four years of one battle scene and a massive 132 physical sets. So you'd expect to accept that, on a massive film project like this, you have to get things wrong to get them right.
Speaking to journalists, including The Nerds of Colour, he explained that the film’s storyboards and constantly moving camera meant the sets couldn’t always make physical sense. One example was a battlefield shot where a character on one side sees someone on the other, who in real life would be smaller than a pixel. His team mocked up options, tested them in camera, and got many of them wrong because the problems were so unconventional. They kept going until it worked. He’s done this a long time, he said, but with challenges that raw, “you just make mistakes, and you learn from them.”
What can we learn from Lowry? Most of us only see the finished version of a painting or project: the polished portfolio, the behind-the-scenes reel where everything looks smooth. Lowry’s story is the part those leave out. If your current illustration, animation, or design isn’t working, it may be at the stage where the first attempt failed and the second hasn’t happened yet.
If LAIKA's artists can spend seven years making characters move millimetres at a time, making mistakes, learning, moving on and improving, then maybe the rest of us can cut ourselves a bit of slack, too. You can see every inch of that work at the Design Museum exhibition, too.
Source: Mike Manalo, The Nerds of Color, 21 September 2026. Visit LAIKA for behind the scenes insights for Wildwood and more.
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