Disney’s ‘Hexed” is ready to cast its spell.
The latest animated feature from Walt Disney Animation Studios follows a young girl named Billie (Hailee Steinfeld), who, as a teenager, discovers that she is a formidable witch. What’s more – she is transported to the secret world of Hexe, a magical land full of other witches. It’s here that she uncovers who she really is, with the help of a surly three-eyed cat voiced by Walton Goggins, and evades the villainous queen of the witches (Jodie Foster). You can watch the brand-new trailer, below.
It arrives in theaters this Thanksgiving and TheWrap recently traveled to the Walt Disney Animation Studios in Burbank, where finishing touches are being put on the film (the company’s satellite studio in Canada is also working hard). We watched more than 30 minutes of the movie and then spoke to some of the creatives behind “Hexed” about the (witch) craft that it took to bring this animated feature to life.
Without giving too much away (hey, we’re still more than a month away from the movie’s release), the footage that they screened was very impressive. After a brief, eye-popping prologue that is animated in a traditional 2D style, things start when Billie is just a baby, and some crows come to take her away. (What is it with crows trying to abduct babies in animated movies this year?) Baby Billie, though, fights back. She even kills one of the crows, which explodes in a PG-appropriate shower of purple goo. Billie’s overprotective mom Alice (Rashida Jones) fashions a bracelet for her with a magical stone that dampens her powers. She wraps it around the baby’s wrist and Billie has that bracelet until she is a teen.
That’s where the footage picked up. Billie is in trouble for rescuing her high school’s beloved mascot, an owl, and is in trouble with the principal. She runs away to the bathroom to try and destroy his hard drive (which contains footage of her committing the crime). In the commotion, she loses her bracelet and all heck brakes loose. You’ve probably seen this in the trailer – things are magically floating around the bathroom. Back at home, Billie accidentally opens a portal to Hexe.
It’s in the sequence where she’s visiting Hexe for the first time that you get the sense of playfulness and magic that the “Hexed” team, led by directors Jason Hand and Fawn Veerasunthorn, are really going for. The scene is set to a reorchestrated version of Dua Lipa’s “Levitating,” there are plenty of Easter eggs for diehard and casual Disney fans alike (including a loving homage to “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment from “Fantasia”), and you get a sense of a fully realized modern fantasy world. It’s a tricky balancing act, one that some recent animated features have been unable to pull off — but with “Hexed,” it looks pretty effortless.
Billie eventually enlists the help of a friend of her mother’s (that’s right – the ties to Hexe run deep!), Beef Roger Crumbchuck (Goggins), a sort of Yoda-style spiritual advisor if Yoda was a three-eyed cat who lived in a dicey neighborhood on Degobah and spoke with a sugary Alabama drawl. That’s when the adventure really begins – as Billie races to stop Queen Celeste from completing a ritual that could impact both of our worlds…
If you can’t tell, “Hexed” has a little bit more edge than most Disney animated fare. It’s a bit darker, tonally, and obviously plays with plenty of the symbology and iconography associated with witches. (You can feel the consumer products people frothing at the mouth; if the movie is a hit the characters from “Hexed” will undoubtedly be a part of every Disney Halloween celebration from now until the sun dies out.)
“The happy thing what we’re doing with Jared [Bush] as our CCO is we want to push and to have a lot of fun in our movies, and to go to areas that maybe we were shying away from before,” said director Hand. “As long as it’s true to the story and to the characters, and I think Billie, as a character who’s trying to break out of these limitations and push things, that’s the kind of character she is. She’s going to take her mom’s car and release the school mascots into the wild because that’s what she feels like she needs to do herself. I’m so excited about being able to push and really go for it. And in this film, we really do that throughout.”
“Comedy is about going in an unexpected route, and you know we were like, Hey, what would be the extreme version of that? and then we’ll see if we are met with limitations. Oftentimes, we are not, and we’re like, We can get away with this,” added director Veerasunthorn.
Producer Roy Conli, a genuine Disney legend, agreed: “We took some big swings on this one.”
Technologically, he lets the incredible team at Walt Disney Animation Studios worry about, say, the complexities of making a single character model for Beef that can stretch and sprout multiple arms. For him, it’s “always story” that remains the most challenging.
“The key issue in this was we wanted to have a really truthful, emotional relationship between a parent and a teen. And I think that that was the goal all along the way,” Conli explained. “And ultimately, that relationship between Billie and Alice is so truthful. I can say that in of all the movies I’ve made, I probably get a tear in my eye in editorial more times on this one than anyone.” And, just to reiterate, Conli produced “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Treasure Planet” and “Tangled,” among others. So the bar is very high.
Jared Bush, who is the Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios and a writer on “Hexed,” said that one of the challenges of the project was creating a fully realized world that stretches beyond the 90 minutes you see in the film.
“It’s not just what you’re seeing on screen. You have to think hundreds of years in the past to the creation of this place. The design philosophy has to make sense with your thematics. All of it is building towards telling the story that you hope will resonate. That takes incredible care and it takes, you know, understanding well, What’s the flora and fauna of that place going to be, and why? Where in the world is it set? Why?” said Bush, who knows a thing or two about worldbuilding having written both “Zootopia” movies and directed last year’s “Zootopia 2,” which made a whopping $1.87 billion worldwide. “For this story, there is an origin story for this place. Why that origin story? You really have to think through all these different pieces. I love that. It’s the most fun. You get to build your little playset and then you get to live in it for years. And then populate it with characters that you bring to life in a way that’s believable, so that you then feel emotionally connected to them. It’s this really fun, hard process that I love.”
For Hand and Veerasunthorn, the hardest thing to crack was Queen Celeste, the evil ruler of Hexe. This marks a homecoming of sorts for Foster, considering some of her early film features were Disney live-action fare, such as 1972’s “Napoleon and Samantha” and 1973’s “One Little Indian.” She also appeared in Disney’s original “Freaky Friday,” which came out the same year that she broke through in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.” Yes, really.
“I think getting Celeste right has been really tricky to make sure that she feels dynamic and evil and pressuring Billy, and to understand why that’s been that was been a tricky one for me,” said Hand.
“Because the obstacle, if it’s greater, it makes Billie more interesting as a character. And where is the right line to like pit these two together?” said Veerasunthorn.
Working with Foster, Veerasunthorn noted, was “amazing.” “It fascinates me that she’s like, ‘Yes, more evil. I can go do more. I can go darker. Would you like that?’ We were like, ‘Oh, yes, please.’ And she brings comedy to this character too,” said Veerasunthorn. (She said that the more comedic bits were not in the footage that we were shown.)
“Within this character — who is evil, who is beautiful, who is elegant — she also has a wicked sense of humor,” Veerasunthorn promised.
And the impression that you get from the footage was that “Hexed,” which is set in present day, offers thoroughly modern relationships between the women – between Billie and her mom and Billie and Queen Celeste. And, yes, we did see a bit of Billie’s mom Alice in the world of Hexe, which has some “Back to the Future,” wait my mom was cool? parallels.
“That’s something with that Disney animation we typically don’t do. Certainly not for something that feels like a fairy tale,” said Bush about the modern setting. He explained that “Wreck-It Ralph” and “Zootopia” are the studio’s “set-in-the-modern-world” movies. But with “Hexed,” it was an opportunity to break tradition. To set a “once upon a time…” movie not in the distant past or some imagined, romantic version of history, but in the world we all experience today.
“It feels like we’re talking about something that’s happening right now. To be able to do that with these characters and then have them step into this other place, it’s really exciting,” said Bush. And to be clear, the world of Hexe is not set in some other time period. These are modern day witches, baby.
“I think it’s like, to me, Hexe feels so comfortingly Disney. We get to go into a magical world. We get to push the boundaries of what’s possible and play with expectation. We could have a three-eyed cat. To me, those are all the things that, as a kid, that’s what I’m gravitating towards,” said Dana Ledoux Miller, who first worked with Bush on the live-action “Moana” adaptation and then brought her into the studio to co-write and direct “Moana 2,” a process that involved transforming a six-part Disney+ series into a single, big-ticket-worthy cinematic event. (“Moana 2” made $1.05 billion at the global box office.)
Ledoux Miller continued: “But we also really ground it in modern day and I think we get to blend those two worlds in a way that we haven’t really done here before. That’s an exciting challenge because anytime you make a Disney animated movie, it’s a responsibility because you’re carrying 100 years of history and of amazing creative energy into this new movie you’re making. I think everyone in this studio wants to live up to that legacy. And so everybody every day is coming in and being like, I want to create Disney magic. And this time we’re actually making magic, but it’s been a really fun process. It’s hard to dream up what magic looks like in this place. What does it mean? How does it feel? We have to think about our effects artists are like, The magic is made out of this element, and that’s how it translates to the screen. Everyone here takes exceptional care in thinking through how the physics of everything works and how it’s grounded in reality but also feels elevated and special.”
“Grounded in reality but also feels elevated and special” sure sounds a whole lot like “Hexed.”
“Hexed” arrives in theaters on Nov. 25.
