In most Disney movies, magic sparkles. In HEXED, some of it sheds.

"Beef's magic involves a lot of dusty cat hair instead of pretty pixie dust," director Fawn Veerasunthorn explained at Walt Disney Animation Studios' early access day for the studio's 65th animated feature, describing the spells cast by Beef Roger Crummchuk, the reclusive three-eyed cat voiced by Walton Goggins. "And he has a little bit of sparkle that's kind of in his fizzy drinks."

It's a funny detail, and it says a lot about the movie. Over the filmmaker press conference, Veerasunthorn, co-director Jason Hand and producers Yvett Merino and Roy Conli kept coming back to the same idea. Magic in HEXED should feel tactile, almost like you could touch it. It should look different for every character. And it should come from a long chain of artists, designers and engineers, much of it worked out by hand before it ever reaches a computer.

When a reporter asked the question everyone in Hollywood seems to be asking right now, whether AI had a place in the pipeline, Merino answered by pointing to people. "It really is just something special with that human touch of it all," she said, "that you're not going to get anywhere else, and you're not going to get through automation of anything."

For a studio whose whole brand is magic, that's a pointed thing to say about how the magic gets made.

We traveled to Walt Disney Animation Studios a few weeks ago to get a first look at the process of making HEXED, so let’s dive in with your sneak peek!

First, the basics. HEXED, which opens exclusively in theaters November 25, 2026, follows Billie Doe (Hailee Steinfeld), an impulsive, unconventional 16-year-old who learns she has magical abilities that have been held back without her knowledge since childhood. Once those powers are unleashed, Billie is pulled out of suburbia and into Hexe, a vast realm of witches. She is even more surprised to find her cautious, overprotective mother, Alice (Rashida Jones), along for the ride. Together they uncover family mysteries that, according to the studio, "could change the world of witches forever."

The cast also includes Jodie Foster as the calculating Queen Celeste, Tracey Ullman as the enchanted quill Ms. Quill, Stephen Fry as the magical journal Elias Quire, and Yvette Nicole Brown as Teacup, part of an enchanted tea set in Celeste's palace. Billie also gets a companion who never says a word: Bucket, a big, clunky, fiercely loyal cauldron. Veerasunthorn ("Wish") and Hand ("Moana 2") direct, with Josie Trinidad ("Zootopia+") as co-director. The script is by Disney Animation Chief Creative Officer Jared Bush and Dana Ledoux Miller ("Moana 2").

Under all the spell-work is a very relatable story. "It was really exciting – the idea of examining what it feels like to be a mother, told through the story of a daughter," Veerasunthorn says in the film's production notes. "Not everyone is a mom, but everyone was someone's kid at some point."

Witches are having a big pop-culture moment, so a reporter asked whether the filmmakers had worked to avoid the genre's familiar tropes. Hand didn't apologize for the genre. "Some of them you just fully embrace because that's the whole reason why you go see a movie about magic—we want to see magic on screen," he said. "But I think the great part about what we're able to do at Disney is we can make it different than anything else. We can have so much fun and comedy and weirdness."

According to Hand, the thing that sets HEXED apart is texture. "What we really leaned into on this particular film was this special, weird, tactile quality of magic that sort of goes to even the textures of their skin to their clothing," he said. "And so we wanted everything to have this tactile quality."

He pointed to a moment from the footage shown that day: "Billie's hands are on top of her desk, and those sparks of magic are popping off, and they actually hit the desk and bounce off. Going back to that tactile nature of being able to reach out and touch our magic, really feel it—that was really important to us."

One reporter noted that for a long time, Disney magic "always looked like pixie dust or Disney dust." Veerasunthorn said the team starts somewhere else entirely: with personality. Billie, she said, is "unrefined, has a lot of raw potential," so her magic had to be "things that are hard to control, because we want the audience to lean in and be like, 'Well, that's a lot of potential, but that can be kind of a hot mess. Let's see where that goes.'"

Color follows the same rule. Hand credited production designer Lorelay Bové and "the team behind the color of everything" for being "so specific about everybody's magic having an individual color and also coming from the personality of each of the characters." Queen Celeste's magic, he hinted, is one of the treats still to come.

The idea goes all the way down to how magic works in Hexe. The production notes lay out the film's "Three I's": Intention, Ignition and Inwitchification. "Intention, which is what you want the spell to be," Bush explains in the notes. "Ignition, which is the spark of the witch or wizard who's creating it, it's your own personal flair. And then something called Inwitchification, which is what makes that spell possible." At the press conference, one reporter asked, half-joking, whether the team now thinks of the animation pipeline the same way. Veerasunthorn said the system grew out of putting "ourselves in the audience's shoes," and Hand summed it up: "Everybody's magic will have a different look depending upon your own intention or your personality."

This is where the craft story starts to sound like a statement. Veerasunthorn pointed out a role she called unusual: "At Disney, we have a position called Effect Designer, which Dan Lund is one of those. He comes from 2D, and you can tell the shape language is very particular. So all the design that we have researched was done initially by hand first just to test out the look of it, and then the CG side comes in and we go from there."

Conli made sure to name more of the people behind the work, crediting the film's heads of effects: "I just wanted to call out Erin Ramos and Marlon West, who are our heads of effects, who have done just a phenomenal job in this thing. The effects are phenomenal." The production notes also list a dedicated 2D animator on the film, Tyler Pacana, who animated Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and Donald Duck in hand-drawn shorts and worked on Mini Maui in "Moana 2."

Merino, who won an Oscar for producing "Encanto," brought it back to the whole crew. "From our design team to our effects artists to our lighters—everyone who brings it all to life—it takes everyone," she said. "We have the ability now to go individually to each character and what their magic represents and what it looks like."

Then came the AI question. A reporter noted that Disney Animation hires some of the best technologists in the world to build its tools. With "the use of artificial intelligence" a constant topic around town, the reporter asked whether the team had tried new technologies on HEXED, and whether AI was part of the pipeline.

Merino, who started her own Disney Animation career in the studio's Technology department, answered with a defense of the studio's engineers and of how artists and technologists push each other. "Well, we do have the best engineering technology team in the world. I'm not just saying that because I started in technology years ago," she said. "But that is one of the things that we really continue to challenge ourselves on: how technology meets our art, and how our art challenges our technology."

She described a two-way loop: "Our artists will see something that our software engineers do, and be like, 'Oh, you know what, if we do this,' and then they push it further." And she made the studio's priorities clear: "We have no limits on our imagination anywhere. Not just in this building, but anywhere. But we really do put no limits on our artists."

Then she landed on the line that made the room's point for it.

She credited even the happy accidents to people. "Our engineers will be like, 'Oh, I meant to do this, but hey, I ended up going down this road,' and that inspires our art in that way."

To be precise, Merino didn't list specific tools, and she didn't give a flat yes or no on whether AI touches any part of the studio's workflow. What she did was frame Disney Animation's identity around the people in the building: the artists, the software engineers, the crew who "keeps the lights going." At a time when animators, voice actors and audiences are all asking what AI means for the art form, that framing matters. It's also a clear signal of what Disney Animation wants HEXED to stand for.

If HEXED has a breakout character, it may be Beef Roger Crummchuk. One reporter called him "such a weird character" made of elements "you wouldn't think would fit together, like the voice, the eyes, and the cat." The press notes call him "curmudgeonly," and Bush calls him "crusty," adding that Beef "is not a warm and fuzzy mentor to Billie."

Conli said the character "started very early in the development of the film" and credited his voice actor: "Walton Goggins has just been an amazing partner in this whole thing. What a joy." He added, "With Beef particularly, there's a spirit to Walton's humor, but also his soul, that kind of makes this character stand out as someone totally in kind of the Disney canon."

Veerasunthorn explained Beef's place in the story with a premise that's hard to resist. "Beef has a deep history with Alice, right? So we thought, when you have to go find someone who can help you, what type of character would be the most fun, broken, drunken uncle you can hang out with that knows a bunch of secrets about your mom? We're like, 'We'll go with that.'"

For Hand, Beef goes back to the very beginning of his time on the film. "The very first day I started on this film, we were designing—we started working on Beef Roger, and then that translated into his trailer and this idea that it can pack up by itself," he said. "I think we just found an endless well of entertainment, unique, weird takes on things like animal familiars that will have a connection to witches, but its own very specific thing."

Beef is also a showcase for the animators. "From an animation perspective, which we care deeply about, to really push it and be able to stretch and have them have multiple arms that pop out," Hand said, "doing that in CG in a really unique way was such a fun challenge for everybody. All the animators wanted Beef Roger scenes because he's so fun and pushed."

Conli also praised the rest of the cast: "The cast on the whole has been phenomenal," he said, pointing to Steinfeld's Billie, Foster's Celeste and Jones' Alice.

The tactile magic and the cat-hair comedy sit on top of a story the filmmakers clearly take seriously. In the production notes, Bush says the goal for Alice was "to craft a mother character who was unlike any mother we'd put on screen before": "Somebody who was deeply flawed, who had a lot to learn about themselves and who would do anything for their child." Veerasunthorn adds that "it turns out that Alice knows magic, even if her magic sucks."

Celeste, by Hand's account, was "probably the hardest character we had to crack on this movie." He describes her in the notes as "someone who is really bad, but who also has so much drive and believes she is doing the right thing." About Foster, he says: "She wants to know what's driving Celeste and enjoyed chewing up the scenery with this character." Bush puts it more bluntly: "She's a wounded person who behaves very badly."

Then there's Billie. Conli says in the notes, "She's not striving for perfection. She's striving to know herself." It's an easy line to imagine on a poster, and it fits a film whose magic system is built on the idea that every witch's power starts from within. Ledoux Miller frames it as a theme in the notes: "We're all born with potential, we're all born with magic inside of us."

In a lot of ways, HEXED is a very Disney project: a coming-of-age story, a parent with secrets, a scene-stealing animal sidekick and a villain who loves the scenery. But the early access day pitch wasn't nostalgia. The pitch was craft. Disney's filmmakers were selling magic that leaves a mark, effects that begin as drawings, and a studio-wide belief that the best surprises happen when an engineer wanders off-plan and an artist runs with it.

Whether audiences end up caring how the cat hair got onto the screen is a question for November. Still, it was striking to hear a Disney Animation producer, asked about AI, answer with the studio's people. On a film literally about witches learning that the magic comes from inside them, it's on theme.

In theaters, HEXED will be preceded by the short LILO & SCRATCH. Disney's HEXED opens exclusively in theaters November 25, 2026.

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