Disney Animation Unleashes "Hexed," a Witchy Mother-Daughter Tale, at Annecy
Walt Disney Animation Studios came to the Annecy International Animation Film Festival this week with two surprises in tow. Once the studio's freshly announced short Lilo & Scratch had its moment, directors Jason Hand and Fawn Veerasunthorn turned the room over to the magic they've been brewing for nearly three years: Hexed, the studio's 65th animated feature, due in theaters November 25th.
The Hexed portion opened with a sizzle reel set to "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," stitching together magical figures from Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Frozen, and beyond. Magic, Veerasunthorn noted, has been a wellspring for the studio from Walt Disney's era through the '80s and '90s Renaissance to today, and Hexed is meant to carry that legacy forward. The footage itself was a genuine work in progress, a deliberate blend of storyboards, layout, rough animation, finished animation, and final render, all with temporary sound.
At the center of the story is Billie Doe (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld), introduced as the first Disney heroine to stomp around in combat boots. She's opinionated, scrappy, and stuck in a world of rules she can't stand. Concept art revealed a hooded cape laced with a thorny-vine motif that feels like a nod to Sleeping Beauty. Her mother, Alice, is voiced by Rashida Jones. The character team, led by heads of animation Michael Franceschi and Louis Jones, leaned into the exaggerated proportions of the Milt Kahl era, a design choice the directors said opens up plenty of room for physical comedy.
Hexed opens 15 years before the main events, where a one-year-old Billie discovers magic within her and accidentally tears open a portal to another realm. A ridiculously cute rough-animation pass of baby Billie floating awake and delighting in the portal drew big laughs. Alarmed, Alice gives her daughter a bracelet framed as "protection,” but it secretly caps Billie's magic so she can never open another portal. That tension between limitation and potential becomes the spine of their relationship.
Fast-forward fifteen years: Alice grinds away at the most boring job in the most boring town (the company motto, glimpsed in concept art, reads "Think Inside the Box"), while Billie chafes against school uniforms and rules she didn't choose. After getting hauled into the principal's office over a liberated school mascot (a real owl in a cage), Billie snatches his laptop and bolts for the bathroom to destroy the evidence, only for her bracelet to snag and snap on a hook, sending her powers haywire and dousing the principal in purple goo.
Spooked, Alice prepares to skip town, prying up floorboards to retrieve stashed magical artifacts, including a spellbook. As she packs, a menacing crow-shaped shadow turns out to be just a pigeon. Or was it? Billie, meanwhile, paces a purple bedroom cluttered with bespoke decor (including Aladdin's magic carpet), experiments with her own magic, and opens a portal of her own, leading into a wooden hall lined with witchy ephemera and a mural depicting witches persecuted by settlers before retreating into the woods and their own realm.
There, she's met by a magical book named Elias Quire (Stephen Fry) and an enchanted quill (Tracey Ullman), who put her through a wry, BuzzFeed-style questionnaire, riffing on whether she's ever been persecuted, drowned, or burned at the stake, before admitting her into Hexe, a safe haven for witches.
Billie steps into a world where nature and magic intertwine; beautiful, wild, and a little unhinged. A 2D animation test showed her coaxing a pumpkin to grow, only for it to explode; another found her trying on magical fashions at a mirror, including a black dress with raven wings. Just as she realizes this might be where she belongs, her mother turns up and is promptly captured by Hexe's magical police, leaving Billie to wonder how Alice got there and what the authorities want with her.
To mount a rescue, Billie gains a companion in Bucket, a walking enchanted cauldron who behaves like a loyal dog she can ride (a test animation by Tyler Pacana showed Bucket wobbling on 3 legs and flopping onto its side, using one of its handles like a snout to sniff something out). The pair set out to find Beef Roger Crummchuk, a three-eyed magical cat Veerasunthorn cast as Billie's Yoda, a surly, reclusive Cheshire-by-way-of-the-swamp character with a body that stretches and floats and a head that lifts clean off its neck to fish out, say, a martini glass. He's a bit of a drinker, the directors joked, though strictly in a Disney-magical sense. He packs up his magical hoarder's paradise of a trailer to ferry them on the mission.
From there, the world only gets bigger and stranger: concept art revealed a Maleficent-worthy castle guarded by a giant, chained bat, animals that double as powerful witches, and a tower sequence in which three bats attack Billie before transforming into witches. Eagle-eyed viewers caught Billie's nails (blue, dotted with stars and crescent moons), echoing the Sorcerer's Hat from Fantasia, the studio's own emblem. The throughline, the directors stressed, is family: Billie's full potential is bound up in secrets about her mother's past, and the two will ultimately lift each other up to redefine the world of witches.
Veerasunthorn, speaking as both a daughter and a mother, framed the film as a chance to get curious about the sides of our parents we never thought to ask about: the joy, the mischief, the mistakes, and how much of who we are may have taken shape long before we were born.
Hexed is, at its heart, a Disney movie that makes the witch the protagonist for a change, and the footage wears its influences proudly, conjuring a '90s witchy nostalgia somewhere in the neighborhood of Hocus Pocus and Sabrina the Teenage Witch, refracted through Disney Animation's house style. Wrapping the panel up under the proverbial Sorcerer Hat, the directors credited their third co-director, Josie Trinidad (Zootopia+), who was not present, along with Oscar-winning producers Roy Conli (Tangled, Big Hero 6) and Yvett Merino (Encanto, Zootopia 2), plus production designer Lorelay Bové (Wreck-It Ralph, The Princess and the Frog, Big Hero 6). They’ve all worked together with the talented artists at Disney Animation to enchant audiences this fall.
Hexed casts its spell in theaters on November 25th.