A Home Booth in Durango and a 48-Hour Contest Put Lissy Jiménez Guajardo in Laika’s Wildwood. She Recorded Three Roles in Seven Minutes

Lissy Jiménez Guajardo started saving her pocket money for microphones when she was 11. This year she built a home studio in Durango, in northern Mexico, so she wouldn’t have to keep travelling to Mexico City for dubbing work. Then a weekend contest, a 48-hour deadline and an audition with hardly any views put her in the Mexican Spanish cast of Wildwood, Laika’s new stop-motion film, which opened in cinemas across Mexico on 29 October.

Her story was told on 30 October by La Voz de Durango, the city’s local paper, which calls her a filmmaker from Durango. It’s a small credit on a big film. She’s listed among the additional voices. It’s also a route plenty of voice actors outside the big dubbing cities will recognise: a booth at home, remote jobs, and one open call.

Screenshot: La Voz de Durango, 31 October 2026

Pocket money and homemade microphones

According to the paper, what began at 11 as a childhood fascination, fed with savings, allowances and homemade microphones, is now professional work. Her move into the industry picked up early this year, when she got in touch with independent production companies in Mexico.

Most Mexican dubbing is recorded in Mexico City. To avoid constant trips to the capital, she and her family turned part of their house in Durango into a professional home studio. Sound engineers who work in the industry tested it and approved it, the paper reports, and that opened the door to remote work on independent projects, background voices and digital content.

That detail is worth underlining for anyone building a booth. The room didn’t get her the film. Passing a check by engineers who knew what a dubbing studio expects got her the remote work, and the remote work kept her ready.

Forty-eight hours, one weekend

The break came while she was somewhere with no booth at all, scouting film locations in the mountains of Durango. She saw a TikTok video from the cinema chain Cinépolis, presented by dubbing actor Emilio Treviño, announcing a national contest called Doblaje Wildwood Cinépolis.

Entrants had 48 hours over a weekend. She went back to her booth, dubbed the lead character from the Wildwood trailer and sent it in. The platform had technical problems, and her entry had a modest number of plays next to rivals with thousands of views. The casting team picked her anyway, unanimously, the paper says.

“They told us it wasn’t a contest about views or likes,” Jiménez told La Voz de Durango. “The casting team went through every video one after another, and when they saw mine they said: ‘It can’t be, it’s her, she has spectacular talent and we have to give her the chance.'”

Seven minutes at Grande Studios

The win took her to Mexico City and to Grande Studios, which the paper describes as one of the country’s most prestigious dubbing facilities, with work on Star Wars, Avengers and Christopher Nolan’s films behind it.

Directed by actress and dubbing director Angie Villa, she recorded a “triplete,” three supporting characters in one film. The session was booked for half an hour. She finished it in seven minutes, a sign of how ready she walked in.

While she was in the capital she also recorded an interview for Paloma y Nacho, Cinépolis’s film segment. Then she kept quiet. Her contract came with a strict confidentiality clause, and the news only came out when the film’s official credits were revealed.

The film around her

Wildwood is directed by Travis Knight for Laika, the studio behind Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings, and is based on the novel by Colin Meloy, with illustrations by Carson Ellis. Prue McKeel goes into the Impassable Wilderness outside Portland, Oregon, to rescue her baby brother, who’s been carried off by crows. At two hours and twenty minutes it’s the longest stop-motion feature ever made, according to Cinépolis’s Paloma y Nacho guide to the film, with 136 sets and 231 puppets.

Image: LAIKA

The Mexican Spanish lead voices are Macarena García as Prue, Emilio Treviño as Curtis, Javier Ibarreche as Brendan and Natalia Téllez as Alexandra, according to SensaCine México’s review. It’s García’s first dubbing role.

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Treviño, who’s no stranger to dubbing, talked about the film’s heart at a press conference. “Courage is sometimes found more in empathy and in warmth and in love than in the action scenes and battles,” he said, as reported by SensaCine.

The same outlet’s critic went further, calling Wildwood a real triumph for animation over the advance of artificial intelligence. “However well AI manages to imitate an aesthetic, it will never fully replace the artistic vision, the dedication and the collective work behind a production of this size,” the review says. That’s a line a lot of dubbing actors will want to frame.

What a home booth can and can’t do

Jiménez says she’ll keep training and building her career in national dubbing, alongside her filmmaking in Durango. The paper calls her win a vote of confidence from the industry in emerging talent from Mexico’s interior. For voice actors watching from far outside the capital cities, her year is a useful map.

It was also a little lucky. A contest she found on her phone in the mountains is not a career plan, and plenty of good voices never see the video in time. But when hers turned up, on a weekend, with two days to deliver, she had a booth to go home to and the habits to use it well.

Sources: La Voz de Durango (Juan José Nava, 30 October 2026); SensaCine México (interview with Emilio Treviño, 22 October 2026, and review, 28 October 2026); Paloma y Nacho, Cinépolis. Quotations from Spanish sources are translated by Voice Over Herald. Main image: LAIKA.

Lee este artículo en español: Un home studio en Durango y un concurso de 48 horas llevaron a Lissy Jiménez Guajardo a Wildwood de Laika. Grabó tres personajes en siete minutos

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