Disney’s Latest Short "Versa" Uses Dance and Music to Explore Loss, Grief, and Hope
A cosmic dance of love, loss, and healing. A deeply personal story from Disney veteran Malcon Pierce.
Sometimes the most powerful stories come from the heart. Walt Disney veteran animator Malcon Pierce brings such a story to life in his animated short Versa, screening at Animation Is Film this weekend.
What’s Happening:
- According to Variety, Versa tells the deeply personal journey of a young couple hoping to start a family, navigating a spectrum of emotions, from grief and loss to ultimate joy, through an ethereal, abstract, and cosmic dance of life.
- Pierce drew inspiration from his own life: during the making of Moana, he and his wife Keely tragically lost their infant son, Cooper. In their grief, Pierce channeled their story into the short.
- A crystal star, gifted by his mother-in-law and tied to Cooper’s baby shower theme of stars, found a place in their kitchen window and became a poignant symbol woven into Versa’s narrative.
- Using visual storytelling to process his grief, Pierce discovered solace and strength in his art. He eventually pitched the idea to Disney Animation’s Chief Creative Officer, Jennifer Lee, sharing a slideshow of concepts. Over coffee, Lee was supportive but encouraged him to explore the story from the character’s perspective.
- Felix then elevated Pierce’s vision, creating seven paintings inspired by the original slideshow that brought the story to life in new ways.
- Versa comes alive through music and movement, including an ice dance that required choreographers to help weave the story together. The goal was to convey a journey of love, loss, grief, and healing entirely through choreography without any dialogue.
- Pierce collaborated with ice dancers and choreographers Katherine Hill and Ben Agosto, whose expertise added authenticity to the animation. Together, they explored how ice dancing and choreography could capture the emotional push and pull between the two parents.
- Composer Haim Mazar crafted a dynamic score using a 69-piece orchestra that evolved alongside the characters’ emotional journey. “He incorporated ‘90s synth elements, but it’s also big and orchestral with full strings and horns," Pierce explains. The team went through at least three iterations before nailing the right emotional tone. As the animation for Versa came together, the music amplified the parents’ story, pulling on the audience’s heartstrings.
- Additional inspiration came from Frozen 2 co-director Chris Buck, who recommended the book Permission to Mourn. A line about how grief can split a person open struck a deep chord with Pierce, shaping the film’s emotional core.
- Pierce also shares that Cooper’s name appears in the Moana credits as a production baby, except it has a star next to it.
What They’re Saying:
- Malcon Pierce:
- “Every morning we’d come downstairs, all these little rainbows would be spread around the house from the little star, and it became a way of remembering Cooper and keeping him close to us,"
- “There’s a shot where the dad skates around the mom and puts his head to listen to their baby in the belly and gets kicked. In the storyboards, we had the dad coming up and kneeling down, but Ben and Kat were like, ‘What if Dad skates around Mom?’ So we were starting to uncover these really incredible nuances,"
- “I had always wanted to have these characters transform into a newer version of themselves. I think a lot of times when we think about characters having this devastation in their life, there’s an idea that you heal from it, and when you heal, you’re fixed. I feel like what I’ve learned is that grief, those steps, are a way for you to have a relationship with grief and to be able to keep those that you’ve lost much closer."
- “We got the idea of incorporating the Japanese art of Kintsugi, this beautiful art where they fill cracks in pottery with gold. It’s symbolic. That was something that we really worked hard on—this idea of earning a relationship with grief and finding hope through the hard stuff."