Disney's Hexed Director Says The Internet Is Wrong About the Movie's First Trailer Amid Backlash: 'It Was Bizarre'

A director on Disney’s Hexed answered the internet backlash that met the animated movie’s first trailer, and he thinks the online crowd read it wrong. Hexed is Walt Disney Animation Studios’ next original feature, a fantasy about an impulsive teenager named Billie who learns she is a witch and gets swept out of her ordinary life into a hidden world of magic. The film reaches theaters over Thanksgiving weekend. Its debut trailer, though, set off a debate that had nothing to do with the witches or the story.

In an interview with Cartoon Brew at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, director Jason Hand rejected the popular theory that Hexed was framed for vertical, phone-sized video. He said the whole reaction blindsided him, and his fellow director, Fawn Veerasunthorn, felt the same way.

Hand expects the complaint to fade once viewers see more of what his team shot, and he waved off the idea as "bizarre and not true":

"We’ve seen the incredible cinematography our team is doing, and I feel like this one is going to go away naturally. It was bizarre and not true."

The backlash the trailer received caught both filmmakers by surprise. "I wasn’t expecting that one, obviously," Hand said. Veerasunthorn added, “That one caught me off guard.”

Veerasunthorn further addressed the drama by pointing to how much effort the people working on the movie put "into every frame":

"We put so much intention into every frame when it comes to where the characters stand and what surrounds them. We’re asking, 'Does she feel free at this moment? Is she restricted?' There’s a lot of thought put into that."

Hand also circled back to the aspect-ratio work the team put in, and he expects the noise to die down. "We’re also doing so many interesting things with how the world feels to our character from an aspect ratio perspective, so I think this will pass," he said.

This entire drama started in mid-June, when Disney released the first Hexed trailer. Rather than talk about the plot, a large chunk of viewers fixed on how the shots were composed. 

The trailer seemed to place most of the action in the middle of the frame, and people ran with a theory that the crew composed the footage so clips would crop into a tall, 9:16 shape for TikTok and Instagram Reels without losing anything important.

Some fans went further and tested it themselves. They trimmed the trailer down to a vertical strip and showed that the key details were still not lost, which only fed the fire. The debate got more intense as the day went by, with some netizens even going as far as claiming that Hexed's character designs looked close enough to AI-generated art, tagging it with the infamous "slop" label.

Will Hexed Change Minds Before It Reaches Theaters?

The negativity surrounding the film puts Disney in a bit of a tricky position. The directors can be dead right about their framing and still lose the argument if the consensus surrounding the movie remains the same when it hits theaters. Disney unveiled new footage at the Annecy Film Festival, and some attendees say it completely debunks the claim that the movie was built for vertical screens.

However, as promising as the Annecy footage sounds, it was played to a room of festival guests rather than the families who buy tickets in November. The good thing is that Disney has only released one trailer so far, and a good second trailer and more public footage could quickly change people's perception about Hexed.

Why does any of this matter for a cartoon about a teenage witch? Because original animation is now one of the toughest sells in the business. Audiences will turn up for a sequel like Zootopia 2, which became the highest-grossing animated Hollywood film ever with $1.7 billion worldwide. Fresh ideas, on the other hand, struggle to find an audience nowadays. Pixar’s Elio, for example, had the worst debut in the studio’s history last summer. Hexed is the first original feature from Walt Disney Animation since Wish, which came and went without much of a mark. So it's important Disney changes people’s minds quickly with more compelling footage before November if the film is to have a successful box office run.