Mexican Audiences Want Wildwood Redubbed Without Its Star Voices. One of Them Says He Might Not Have Got the Role as Just a Dubbing Actor
Laika’s Wildwood took 16 years to make. A week after it opened in Mexico, nearly 5,000 people have signed a petition asking for a new Latin American Spanish dub, with professional voice actors in place of the actress, the presenter and the film critic voicing three of its leads. One of them has answered, and so have two of Mexican dubbing’s best-known voices.
Wildwood: El bosque salvaje opened in Mexican cinemas on 29 October. Infobae calls it the most ambitious film yet from Laika, the stop-motion studio behind Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings, directed by Travis Knight from Colin Meloy’s novel. The same outlet reports it has passed 50 million dollars at the international box office.
In Mexico, though, the talk isn’t the puppets. It’s the voices. Three of the four leads in the Latin American Spanish version were cast from outside dubbing, the kind of casting the industry calls “star talent”. Within days, audiences on TikTok and Instagram were posting their own redubs of the trailer, and on Change.org a fan called Stefanny Alanis had started a petition asking Laika and its Mexican distributor, Imagem Films, to record the film again.
When Voice Over Herald checked on 6 November, it had 4,859 verified signatures.
Hear the voices
Here’s the official dubbed trailer from Imagem Films Mexico, so you can judge for yourself. Prue speaks first, a few seconds in, and Curtis answers.
Hear the voices: the Latin American Spanish trailer for Wildwood: El bosque salvaje. Video: Imagem Films Mx, on YouTube
Who voices whom
Macarena García, 25, a telenovela and series actress best known for Netflix’s Control Z, voices Prue McKeel, the girl who walks into the Impassable Wilderness to find her baby brother. Infobae says she revealed at press events that it’s her first dubbing job.
Image: LAIKA, from Cinépolis's official trailer
Javier Ibarreche, a film critic and content creator, voices Brendan, the Bandit King, the role Mahershala Ali plays in English. Natalia Téllez, a television presenter, voices the Governess, Alexandra Svik. The fourth lead, Emilio Treviño as Curtis, is the exception everyone points to. He’s a dubbing actor whose credits include Miles Morales in the Spider-Verse films and Denji in Chainsaw Man.
Readers of this site have met the Mexican Wildwood once already. On 31 October we reported how Lissy Jiménez Guajardo, recording from a home booth in Durango, won her way into the cast through a 48-hour Cinépolis contest that Treviño fronted. That’s the other side of this dub: real working actors in the supporting roles, and famous names at the top of the poster.
What the petition asks for
The petition is addressed to Laika Studios and Imagem Films Mexico. It asks for a complete new Latin American Spanish dub with a cast made up entirely of professional voice actors and proper voice direction. It argues that the current track hurts immersion, and that it matters beyond the cinema run, because whatever Spanish audio ships now will sit on the streaming and home release for good.
The complaints Milenio rounded up are more about the decision than the people. “I’m not criticising the people who will do the dubbing… What I’m criticising is the decision to give this project to people with little or no experience to play the main characters,” wrote the TikTok user PseudoReseñas. One viewer whose video passed 50,000 likes put it more briskly: “Beautiful film, but what bad dubbing, eh. Hire people who actually do this for a living.”
The Bolivian YouTuber M! Clip went furthest, titling his review “The Latin American dub ruined a masterpiece”.
Ibarreche: “Possibly I wouldn’t have got this role”
Ibarreche has answered the criticism head on, and with unusual frankness. Speaking to the content creator Mili, he said he understands why people push back when someone is hired for their profile.
“I know that because I’m known as a content creator, it looks as if they’re hiring me only for the notoriety,” he said, as quoted by Excélsior. “I’m very clear that the opportunities I’ve had over these last few years of my career have to do precisely with the numbers I’ve generated as a content creator. I know that if I’d only been a dubbing actor, possibly I wouldn’t have got this role.”
He defended the work, too. “I try to let the work speak for itself. I trust my training as an actor and my recent training as a dubbing actor to do a job worthy of what the film asks for,” he said. “It’s for the audience to judge whether the work was good or not. What I do is put everything I have into making sure the quality of the work is there.”
That first quote is the whole star talent debate in two sentences, and it came from inside the booth. A distributor books a famous name because the name sells tickets. The actor knows it. That’s the trade the petition is objecting to.
The dubbing world weighs in
Two of Mexican dubbing’s best-known voices have joined in. Lalo Garza, the actor and dubbing director behind Krillin in Dragon Ball Z, Josh in Drake & Josh and Elmo in Sesame Street, left a two-word comment under a TikTok video lamenting that the dub was all anyone talked about. “How sad,” he wrote. Milenio says his followers read it as backing for professional dubbing actors.
VoiceEditSuiteNewYour breath. Your pace. Your edit.Learns from numbers, never your audio. Never used to train AI.See how it worksJessica Ortiz, the Mexican Spanish voice of Wonder Woman, didn’t name the film, but her post landed in the middle of it, and she pointed somewhere else entirely. “I want to make something very clear about dubbing and the controversy over a bad dub. Sometimes it isn’t the fault of the star talent or the dubbing actor,” she wrote.
Her point is about direction. With more than 27 years in the job, she said, even she relies on it. “I, for example, know how to dub, but I really need a good director to help me. If I don’t have one, I feel lost.”
It’s a generous read, and an important one. Mexican audiences have loved plenty of famous voices in animation over the years, and Milenio points to Eugenio Derbez, Omar Chaparro and Consuelo Duval as proof. What changed the result, in those cases, was time, preparation and someone in the control room who’d push for another take.
What happens now
Nothing, yet. Excélsior notes that Laika hasn’t announced any change to the voice cast, and a redub is unconfirmed. None of the companies involved has commented in any of the coverage Voice Over Herald read.
Image: LAIKA, from Cinépolis's official trailer
For working dubbing actors in Mexico and across Latin America, though, the week has already done something useful. Thousands of cinemagoers have said out loud, with their names on it, that the voice is part of the film they paid to see, and that it’s a craft. That’s an argument the profession has been making for years. It’s nice to hear the audience make it for them.
Sources: Change.org, “Petición: Solicitud de un nuevo doblaje para Wildwood: el bosque salvaje”, signature count checked 6 November 2026; Milenio, 5 November 2026 (Lalo Garza; Jessica Ortiz) and 6 November 2026 (the petition); Excélsior, Vanessa Arteaga, 4 November 2026; Infobae México, 5 November 2026; Imagem Films Mx, official dubbed trailer. Quotations from Spanish sources are translated by Voice Over Herald. Main image: LAIKA and Imagem Films, from the official dubbed trailer.
Lee este artículo en español: El público mexicano pide redoblar Wildwood sin sus star talents. Javier Ibarreche admite que, solo como actor de doblaje, quizá no habría tenido el papel
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