‘Hexed’ Early Preview: Inside Disney Animation’s New World of Witches and Family Secrets

Magic has always been woven into the fabric of Disney animation. Whether it’s the fairies of Sleeping Beauty bickering over whether to make Aurora’s dress pink or blue, Mickey Mouse donning a celestial pointy hat in Fantasia, or Mirabel living with her family in a magical casita in Encanto, the impossible has long been one of the studio’s favorite storytelling tools. With Hexed, Walt Disney Animation Studios’ forthcoming feature, magic and enchantment are tied to something much more personal as a teenage girl tries to understand who she is, and her Type-A mother remains determined to protect her, and the growing distance between them when love and fear begin to look like the same thing.

The Nerds of Color joined a group of journalists at Walt Disney Animation Studios in Burbank, California, for an early look at Hexed, where directors Fawn Veerasunthorn and Jason Hand, co-director Josie Trinidad, producers Roy Conli and Yvett Merino, and writers Jared Bush and Dana Ledoux Miller pulled back the curtain to reveal a few of the tricks behind the magic of the film’s story, characters, and creative process.

During our 30-minute preview, Hexed wastes little time casting its first spell. The film opens with a traditionally animated prologue inspired by shadow puppetry, using paper-cutout-like silhouettes of witches, wizards, forests, and domed magical realms to recount Hexe’s origins. But instead of boring the audience with a dry history lesson, the exposition comes directly from Billie, whose narration immediately filters the mythology through her own personality.

She explains that witches and wizards once wielded powers heightened by the moon, until fear forced them to seek refuge in an enchanted realm created by an extraordinarily powerful flying witch. Unfortunately, that witch died before she could finish the spell. As such, the unfinished spell left Hexe short of the magical haven it was meant to become, while a prophecy foretold that another extraordinary witch would one day rise beneath the returning Haven Moon and finish what was started.

For Miller, that balancing act is part of what makes the beginning of any film so daunting. She described the first act as carrying “the weight of the whole movie on its shoulders,” because it has to establish tone, introduce characters and relationships, set up the central problems, and still keep an audience entertained. Hexed begins doing all of that before Billie has even properly entered the story, using its mythology lesson to introduce both the world and the irreverent teenager whose quest will eventually reshape it.

The grand mythology quickly gives way to something much smaller and more intimate. A young, newly single mother, Alice, carefully puts her baby daughter, Billie, to bed as a version of “My Girl” plays softly in the background, moving with the exaggerated caution of a parent determined not to disturb a sleeping child. “To the moon and back,” she tells her daughter before lowering her into the crib and instructing her not to get out.

Billie’s rebellious streak appears almost immediately. Moments after Alice puts her to bed, the infant reaches toward the moon, sparks flickering from her hands before a portal tears open in the room, the portal’s edges twisting together like warped tree branches. Two ravens burst through and descend on Billie, who treats the attack more like a game than a threat. When Alice rushes upstairs, she pins one raven against the wall with a broomstick, only to watch in shock as Billie unleashes her own magic and blows another apart in a splatter of pink goo.

For Alice, it is the first unmistakable sign of just how much potential and danger her daughter may possess.

For Jason Hand, that moment becomes the turning point in how Alice parents her daughter. Billie’s powers are extraordinary, but at one year old she has no understanding of the danger they can invite. Watching her daughter put herself in harm’s way convinces Alice that protection has to come before potential. She gives Billie a bracelet that initially appears to be a safeguard, but actually suppresses her magic and prevents her from opening another portal.

Hand said that tension between limitation and unrealized potential would come to define Billie and Alice’s relationship. Alice believes she is keeping her daughter safe, but it’s the opposite as Billie grows up feeling restricted and contained for reasons she does not yet understand.

Fifteen years later, that tension is built directly into Billie’s design. Art director Bill Schwab described the now-16-year-old as a rebellious heroine who has made even her restrictive school uniform her own, pairing it with the combat boots that have become part of her identity. Later, as Billie moves deeper into Hexe, her wardrobe changes with her, gradually shedding those visual restrictions while introducing more of the reds, pointed shapes, and crescent motifs associated with her magical identity.

By the time we catch up with Billie, she and Alice have settled in what Veerasunthorn described as a cookie-cutter neighborhood where “everything feels the same.” Billie feels trapped in a life governed by rules and restrictions, and even her home’s design reinforces that confinement. Straight lines are on the wallpaper and surrounding spaces, something Miller said was intended to evoke the bars of a jail cell. Billie’s own bedroom, by contrast, is messy and chaotic. It is the one place where she can express herself.

That sense of control extends to Alice herself, though the artists were careful not to make her look completely put together. Production designer Lorelay Bové described Billie’s mother as controlled, protective, wide-eyed and a little anxious, with perfect bangs offset by flyaway hairs, an imperfectly arranged undershirt and small asymmetries in her suit. Those imperfections prevent Alice from becoming as rigid as the rules she imposes on her daughter.

Art director Bill Schwab said the team cast a wide net while developing Alice, drawing inspiration from Rashida Jones as they searched for the right balance between anxious mother and capable working parent. Early versions even experimented with a much larger hairstyle before the filmmakers discovered that its movement became distracting once translated into CG. Head of animation Michael Franceschi said the animators then began searching for the physicality of a working mom and multitasker, using everything from the restrictions of her pencil skirt to the lines of her poses to give Alice a slightly frenetic quality.

For all their differences, the animators also wanted Billie and Alice to feel unmistakably related. Franceschi and fellow head of animation Louis Jones found connective tissue in what they called “channel switching,” which is another way of saying the way both characters can occupy one emotion before suddenly snapping into another. It became a subtle performance trait shared between mother and daughter, allowing the animators to suggest their relationship without explicitly calling attention to it.

Now that Billie has grown into what Veerasunthorn described as an opinionated, scrappy 16-year-old and “the first Disney heroine in combat boots,” the future is bright. But the budding witch who is seen as smart but outside her school’s in-crowd is feeling trapped by a life of rules and limitations. As such, she has developed little patience for what Hand called “dumb rules and the status quo.” That rebelliousness is built directly into her design. Schwab said Billie makes even her restrictive school uniform her own, while her combat boots become an extension of her personality. The animators also drew heavily from Hailee Steinfeld’s recording sessions, studying her expressions and gestures while finding a physicality that felt specifically 16. Hand credited Steinfeld with bringing Billie an “aged-up charm and sophistication,” along with the comedy and heart needed to keep her rebellion from becoming one-note.

That rebellious streak comes to a head after Billie “borrows” her mother’s car to rescue — or, as she calls it, liberate — the school’s owl mascot. Confronted by Alice over the minor problem of not having a driver’s license, Billie produces a homemade one anyway. “No, but I do have Photoshop,” she quips before heading upstairs, where even the smallest gestures reinforce the gulf between them. Billie accidentally knocks a picture frame crooked as she passes; Alice immediately straightens it.

The argument continues in Billie’s bedroom, where Alice’s desire to protect her daughter collides with Billie’s desire for freedom. She questions the mugwort Billie has brought inside and notices a bowl of milk by the window, worried about Billie’s reactions to plants and stray cats. Billie, determined to make her point, takes a drink herself and immediately regrets it before returning to the real issue: “No car, no pet, no life.” Alice insists that the guardrails she has placed around her daughter are simply another way of saying she loves her.

For the story team, Miller described this as one of the film’s most important scenes because it has to establish Billie and Alice, the conflict between them, their communication problems, Alice’s secrets, and the larger theme of potential — all within a few short minutes. That already sounds like a lot for one scene to carry, so imagine how much more was packed into its earliest iteration, when the script stretched to roughly five pages.

The scene wasn’t simply longer. It was structured differently. Trinidad described her creative process as constantly thinking about visual inspiration, subtext, and the entertainment she can build around the scene. Once she has the blueprint, she moves into storyboarding, which is a very bare-bones pencil-to-paper approach.

Trinidad then showed an early storyboard pass that combined Billie’s Christmas prank in a very cookie-cutter neighborhood with the confrontation that followed at home, stretching the sequence to more than twice the length of the finished version. But as the story team began questioning what was actually motivating Billie’s rebellion, they realized the two ideas were competing with each other. Separating the prank from the argument let the latter focus more clearly on Billie and Alice and the tension beneath their relationship.

Naturally, some of that material had to disappear. The filmmakers trimmed jokes and dialogue to preserve the humor and tenderness of the relationship without losing sight of the emotional conflict underneath it. For Miller, that meant embracing the old writing adage to “kill your darlings.”

“There were like seven great jokes, and we did kind of get the dynamic between them,” Miller said. “But is it speaking towards this idea, this bigger picture idea? And so we have to start pulling it back.”

That process also allowed the filmmakers to stop explaining everything through dialogue. Trinidad said earlier versions were much more explicit about what Billie was feeling, but as the scene evolved, the team could rely more on acting, staging, and the surrounding environment to communicate those ideas visually.

That willingness to let go goes beyond the writing. Trinidad said storyboards are never meant to be treated as precious finished artwork. “My drawings are never meant to be the final frame,” she said. “The drawings are meant to show the rough version. So same for the script.”

Miller described the process more like building a blueprint that changes hands throughout the film’s production. A writer may hand a scene to the story team, who discovers something new before passing it to animation, and editorial may ultimately decide that even a joke everyone loves is one joke too many. “You watch, and you’re like, ‘You’re right,’” Miller said. “I’m so glad we have those discerning people who are helping us shape it.”

Miller described Alice as a Type-A mother who uses rules to keep Billie safe. To reinforce the helicopter mom visually, story artists placed Alice inside doorframes, surrounded her with straight lines, and even had her straighten objects Billie knocks out of place. Miller compared the wallpaper’s rigid pattern to the bars of a jail cell. Billie’s room, meanwhile, is deliberately messy and chaotic because it is the one space where she can express the part of herself that does not fit inside Alice’s carefully ordered world.

“We’re discovering who the characters are, and we’re pushing and pulling, and we’re creating together,” Trinidad said of the process, emphasizing how important it was for the writers, directors, and story team to remain in sync as the scene moved from script to storyboard to finished visuals. Trinidad says that process starts with thumbnails and rough sketches used to work through staging, composition, subtext, and character behavior before the scene takes a more polished form.

But the scene gradually stops being about curfews, pets, or driving. After screaming into her pillow in frustration, Billie finally tells Alice what all those restrictions feel like from her side. These rules are less about protection and more evidence that her mother believes something is fundamentally wrong with her. “I wish one day I could just feel like who I am isn’t something to worry about,” she admits. Alice can tell her there is nothing wrong with her, but she still cannot bring herself to explain the truth behind those rules.

That misunderstanding became what Miller called the “core wound” between mother and daughter. Alice is trying to keep Billie safe, yet the very restrictions meant to protect her leave Billie feeling unsafe in her own identity. The writers continued revisiting the speech as the movie developed, eventually changing Billie’s fear that she was not “the daughter you want me to be” into something more painful: that she was not “the daughter you hoped I would be.” For Miller, that single word gave Alice something more complicated to respond to, because some part of her really had hoped Billie’s life, and her magic, would be easier to manage.

Miller describes Billie’s speech as intentionally one of the last pieces they finalized, evolving from a much more blunt placeholder as the filmmakers gradually discovered the emotional center of her relationship with Alice.

Among the sequences shown during the preview was the moment those carefully built guardrails finally give way. Billie is summoned to the principal’s office over the stolen mascot and, facing possible expulsion, impulsively grabs the laptop containing the evidence against her before retreating to the girls’ bathroom.

What follows plays like an escalating physical-comedy gag. Billie tries to get into the password-protected laptop, only for a loose drive to slip beneath the neighboring stall. When she reaches for it, her bracelet catches on the partition and comes off. Almost immediately, the same sparks seen around baby Billie return.

At first, the magic manifests in small bursts: faucets turn on, soap spills from dispensers, trash begins floating, and even a rat rises into the air. But Billie has no idea how to control any of it. When the principal announces he is coming in, she instinctively throws out her hands to stop him. Instead, she sends swirling water, toilet paper, and garbage flying straight at him.

The bathroom incident leaves mother and daughter with two very different reactions. Veerasunthorn says Alice immediately panics, fearing that Billie’s newly awakened magic will attract more danger, and prepares to leave town. Billie, however, has finally seen the thing her mother spent years trying to suppress, and its pull is impossible to ignore.

Sent back to her room, Billie begins cautiously experimenting without the bracelet, treating her newly discovered powers with the awkward enthusiasm of someone discovering a part of herself she never knew existed. In one scene, she hesitates to take her finger off the charmed bracelet her mother gave to her. When she discovers nothing would happen, Billie lets loose and tries different hand positions to ignite the magic. Frustrated, she somehow opens the same portal using the skill she displayed as an infant. Alice arrives moments too late, and Billie is pulled through the opening into Hexe.

Her arrival immediately reframes everything she has spent her life believing about herself. Billie encounters an enchanted tome named Elias Quire and a quill named Ms. Quill, who explains that Hexe is a safe haven for people with her “condition.” The questions that follow sound almost tailor-made for Billie: Has she ever been persecuted? Does she possess traits others might call odd, difficult or problematic? Is she searching for a place where she can finally discover all that she is and all that she can be? “My whole life,” Billie answers.

It is a simple response, but it also marks the moment when the movie’s theme of potential stops being something other characters project onto Billie and becomes something she begins actively seeking for herself. From there, the footage opens up into a world that could not look more different from the restrained Plainsville she left behind.

Once Billie steps through the portal, Hexed’s visual language changes. Production designer Lorelay Bové said Plainsville was intentionally built around limitation and restriction, using square, flat shapes, cool colors, and a restrained palette. Hexe, by contrast, was designed around potential and nurturing, bursting with saturated colors, theatrical lighting, and sharp, triangular forms that rise upward rather than box its inhabitants in.

Bové based much of Hexe’s shape language on stacked triangles inspired by the silhouette of a witch’s hat, with the pointed tip representing the channeling of power. That motif carries across the environment through its architecture, geography, and more exaggerated character designs, giving the magical realm a visual identity that feels almost purpose-built for someone like Billie, who has spent her entire life being told to stay within the lines.

That liberation eventually extends to Billie herself. Bové said her wardrobe begins with the restriction of the school uniform, then gradually sheds layers as she moves deeper into the magical world and incorporates more reds and witch-inspired elements. Head of animation Louis Jones said that transformation also affects Billie’s performance, with the character carrying herself with greater confidence as her appearance evolves.

As Billie explores more of Hexe, she learns that casting magic comes down to the three I’s: intention, ignition, and inwitchification. Naturally, Billie takes to her new identity with enthusiasm, trying out spells and happily announcing to anyone who will listen that she is a witch.

But that excitement takes a surprising twist when Billie discovers she can fly. While she initially assumes that is simply something witches do, the stunned reaction around her says otherwise. Billie quickly learns that she is only the third witch in Hexe known to possess the ability. She responds to the shock by saying that she “just got here.” And upon hearing this, she learns outsiders are not exactly welcome in Hexe. So when a pair of constables confront her, Billie’s still-unrefined magic only makes matters worse, and they prepare to restrain her with what are called “magic mufflers.” Before they can, Alice suddenly appears to rescue her, and we find out that Alice is also a witch.

The reveal answers one of Billie’s biggest questions while immediately creating several more. Alice may have spent years hiding magic from her daughter, but her attempted rescue also makes clear that she is a little rusty at using it herself.

Alice’s rescue attempt does not go particularly well. Hand explained that after revealing herself as a witch, Alice is arrested by Hexe’s magical authorities and taken away, leaving Billie alone in a world that has suddenly become much more dangerous.

And Billie’s ability to fly only complicates matters. Veerasunthorn said flying is exceedingly rare in Hexe, with Queen Celeste being the only other witch known to possess the ability. Unfortunately for Billie, the queen “does not like competition.”

Voiced by two-time Academy Award winner Jodie Foster, Celeste has been preparing to perform the Haven Moon spell, the same unfinished spell foretold in the film’s opening prologue. The preview footage shows her not in the middle of a sinister ritual, but rehearsing the elaborate spectacle surrounding what she expects to be her most glorious moment.

With Alice now imprisoned, Billie suddenly has a much bigger problem than figuring out where she belongs. Her ability to fly has also put her on the radar of Queen Celeste, the most powerful witch in Hexe and the only other witch known to possess the same rare ability. As Hand put it, Billie has made “a potential enemy of the most powerful witch in Hex” on her very first day.

There is also the small problem that Billie still barely knows how to use magic.

Unable to rescue Alice on her own, Billie learns there may be someone in Hexe who can help. His name is Beef Roger Crumchuck, a scruffy, three-eyed green cat whose chewed ear, crimped whiskers, limp, filthy, monogrammed robe make him look like a magical recluse who’s been through more than he cares to explain. But getting there means teaming up with Bucket, a walking, swimming enchanted cauldron who behaves more like a loyal dog than cookware.

Together, Billie and Bucket venture into the swamp in search of the character Veerasunthorn jokingly described as Billie’s “Yoda.” Whether Beef actually wants anything to do with her is another matter.

Getting to Beef Roger is another matter. As Billie and Bucket trudge through the swamp, she decides there is no reason to keep slogging through the mud when she has magic. Recalling Hexe’s three I’s, she sets her intention on creating a path and confidently casts the spell.

She has, however, apparently put a little too much emphasis on the I’s. Instead of creating a series of little islands for her and Bucket to cross, actual eyes begin emerging from the swamp.

The magical misfire eventually leads them to Beef Roger Crumchuck, a scruffy, three-eyed green cat whose chewed ear, crimped whiskers, and well-worn robe suggest a recluse who has been living on his own terms for quite some time. Their introduction is not especially welcoming.

Billie tries explaining that Alice has been taken and that she needs his help, but Beef Roger wants nothing to do with her. Even his name becomes an argument, as “Mr. Crumchuck” was apparently his mother. He is Beef Roger Crumchuck, then Beef Roger, or simply Beef, depending on how far down what he calls the “Russian nesting doll box” Billie wants to go.

Only when Billie spots an old image of Beef Roger with Alice does she realize their connection runs much deeper. Her naive assumption that he was Alice’s pet earns an immediate rebuke. Beef Roger is a familiar, he explains, an equal partner to a witch or wizard, and one who has clearly never forgiven Alice for leaving Hexe and leaving him behind.

Billie’s ability to reach her full potential may ultimately depend on understanding the family history Alice has spent years trying to hide. If mother and daughter can finally get past the secrets, fear, and miscommunication between them, they may be able to lift each other up rather than hold each other back.

“I went from being a very pain-in-the-butt teenager to raising teenagers of my own,” he said. “I’ve now seen both sides. The struggle is real.”

Veerasunthorn approached that relationship from another angle. As both a daughter and a mother, she said Hexed offered an opportunity to explore the parts of our parents’ lives that children rarely think to ask about their joy, their mischief, their mistakes, and the people they were before becoming parents.

For Hand, that journey may depend as much on Billie understanding her family as it does on mastering magic. “The key to Billie being able to reach her full potential may come from her ability to unlock her family secrets,” he said, adding that if Billie and Alice can get past the barriers between them, they may ultimately be able to “lift each other up.”

For a movie filled with witches, enchanted worlds, and unruly magic, Hexed may ultimately be asking something much more familiar about the relationship between parent and child, and the lengths to which parents will go to protect their children, and what those children may discover when they finally begin to see their parents as people with their own joys, mistakes, and secrets.

Hexed opens in theaters on November 25, 2026.