When Disney Animation released the first trailer for “Hexed” on June 16, the online reaction wasn’t about the witches, the casting, or the story. It was about how nearly every shot was framed.
Fans and critics quickly noticed that the trailer kept its action centered in the middle of the frame almost every time. That led to a theory spreading across social media that the footage had been composed specifically so it could be cropped cleanly into vertical 9:16 video for TikTok and Instagram Reels.
Several fans demonstrated the point themselves, cropping the trailer to vertical and showing that almost nothing important was lost. The comparison that further fueled the debate was DreamWorks’ “Forgotten Island” trailer, released around the same time, which used a wider variety of framing and blocking. The conversation grew large enough that outlets like Kotaku and Creative Bloq wrote about what it said about modern movie trailers being shaped by phone viewing habits.
The directors got a chance to address it directly after “Hexed” took the stage at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on June 26, where Fawn Veerasunthorn and Jason Hand debuted new footage from the film publicly for the first time, alongside the newly announced Lilo & Scratch short.
In an interview with animation trade outlet Cartoon Brew following the presentation, both directors were asked how frustrating it was to watch a trailer get defined by that conversation. Hand said it wasn’t a reaction the team had anticipated, and Veerasunthorn agreed. “That one caught me off guard,” she said. Hand added that he expects the criticism to fade naturally once people see more of the team’s cinematography, calling the original claim inaccurate. Veerasunthorn pushed back on the cropping theory directly, explaining that the team puts real thought into where characters stand in a shot and what surrounds them, asking themselves whether a character feels free or restricted in any given moment. Hand also pointed to the work the team has done with aspect ratio to shape how the world around Billie feels, and said he thinks the conversation will move past this once more of the film is out in the world.
“Hexed” is still on track for November 25, and the footage shown at Annecy is the first real signal of how the finished film will actually look in motion. For more on the film, check out our coverage of the first trailer.
Hexed Directors Respond to the Trailer’s “Made for Vertical Video” Backlash
