Walt Disney Animation Studios’ short film Versa, directed by Malcon Pierce, began streaming on Disney+ on March 27, 2026, and it is unlike anything the studio has released in years. Fantasy Land News covered Versa when it first screened at the Annecy Animation Festival in June 2025, and now that it is available for everyone to watch at home, we wanted to share what it actually feels like to sit down and experience it.
What Is Versa? Versa is a six-minute animated short about a couple who lose their child in the late stages of pregnancy. There is no dialogue. Not a single spoken word. The entire story is told through movement, animation, and a sweeping orchestral score composed by Haim Mazar and performed by a 65-piece orchestra. The characters, a man and a woman rendered as celestial beings against a backdrop of space and stars, carry everything through their bodies and the way they move around each other.
Pierce, who has been at Disney Animation for 16 years and serves as artistic director at the studio’s Vancouver location, based the story on his own life. He and his wife, Keely Tateossian, lost their son Cooper while Pierce was working on Moana in 2016. Cooper’s baby shower was themed around “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and that imagery found its way into the stars and cosmic world of the film. The short is dedicated to Cooper.
The movement in the film was choreographed by husband-and-wife ice champions Ben Agosto and Katherine Hill. The skating reference was performed by sibling duo Oona and Gage Brown. That foundation gives the characters a physical weight and fluidity that pure animation alone rarely achieves. You feel the grief in every frame because it was built from the kind of movement that real human bodies make when they are reaching toward or pulling away from someone they love.
The Director’s Intro Is a Complicated Choice That Disney Got Right. When you stream Versa on Disney+, Pierce introduces the film before it begins. He speaks briefly about his personal experience and what the short means to him. That introduction, in a normal situation, would be exactly the wrong call. You want to go into a film without a roadmap. You want to discover it.
But this film is different. The subject matter is pregnancy loss in the late stages, which is one of the hardest things a family can go through. And the introduction does something that feels counterintuitive but is actually the smartest decision Disney Animation could have made. It tells you, gently, what is coming.
Because you know, going in, that this story involves losing a child, you do not sit there in easy comfort waiting to be surprised. You sit there knowing. And that changes the experience entirely. The loss in the film arrives quickly, and it is heartbreaking, but what the introduction does is make sure that no one is blindsided in a way that could be genuinely distressing. It is a rare case where giving something away is an act of care toward the audience rather than a storytelling mistake.
How Two People Grieve the Same Loss Completely Differently. The beating heart of Versa is not the loss itself. It is what happens afterward. How the mother and the father carry it in completely different ways.
The mother in the film needs to connect with the grief directly. She does not run from it. She turns toward it, faces it, and lets herself feel it openly. The father is different. He shuts down. He cannot or will not show what he is feeling, and there is something underneath that which feels like a belief that showing those feelings would be a kind of weakness. That if he broke open, something would be lost. Meanwhile, he is just as shattered as she is, carrying the same devastation and hiding it behind a wall he built himself.
That difference, the way two people who love each other can respond to the same tragedy in ways that feel almost opposite, is the entire story of Versa. Pierce has spoken about how he and his wife lived this reality after losing Cooper. She faced it. He retreated. That tension between them, and what it took to find each other on the other side of it, is what the film is about.
Broken, But Not Defeated: The Kintsugi Visual. By the time Versa reaches its final act, the two characters have both come apart. You see it visually in the cracks that form through them. And then the film does something extraordinary.
The cracks do not disappear. They do not go away. The characters do not become whole again in the way they were before. Instead, the cracks fill with the essence of the other person. The color and light of the one flows into the broken places of the other, and it is only in that exchange, in each carrying a piece of what the other gave them, that they can move forward at all.
This is Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with gold. The idea that what has been broken is not hidden or discarded, but repaired in a way that makes the damage visible and beautiful. Pierce discovered this concept through a suggestion from Liz Watson, director of development at Disney Animation, and it became the visual and emotional spine of the film’s ending. You do not come back from this kind of grief healed and unmarked. You come back different, and carrying proof of what you survived, and if you are lucky, you carry pieces of the person who helped pull you through.
There is also a surprise waiting at the very end of the film that we are not going to describe here. Watch it yourself.
A Film That Belongs in the Same Conversation as Fantasia. Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 are two of the greatest things Walt Disney Animation ever produced, not just as animated films but as works of art in any medium. They proved that animation could carry pure emotion through music and movement without a single word of dialogue, and they set a standard that is almost impossible to meet.
Versa belongs in that conversation. It reminded us specifically of “Flight of the Whales” from Fantasia 2000, that sequence with the humpback whales moving through clouds as if they are swimming through the sky, carrying an almost unbearable sense of grace and feeling with no words at all. Versa has that same quality, but it goes further because it has a story behind the imagery that is specific, human, and true. It is not an abstract emotion. It is one person’s grief, turned into something that anyone who has ever loved another person will feel something from.
The production was executive-produced by Jennifer Lee and produced by Bradford Simonsen. It is the first project completed entirely at Disney Animation’s Vancouver studio. None of that matters when you are watching it. What matters is that you feel it.
“The best part of this project has been hearing from folks as they share their own experiences with grief,” says Malcon Pierce. “It can be hard to talk about, because it requires emotional buy-in, so it’s been really rewarding. And, selfishly, it has helped me grow a lot.”
I want to be honest about what watching Versa actually did to me. The subject of this film is losing a child late in pregnancy, and I want to be clear: what I felt during this short was not some detachment from that. That loss is real and specific and devastating to anyone who has lived it. But what the film also did, through that subject, was hit something different in me. I felt the weight of loss in a more general sense. And by the end, I found myself thinking about my wife, Holly, and how many times over the years she has pulled me out of my own darkness when I had built the same walls that the father in this film builds. Only through her was I able to become whole again. That is what this film did to me. And if you are somewhat connected to your own feelings, it is going to do something to you, too. Women are extraordinary.
Disney’s Versa Is Now Streaming on Disney+ and You Should Watch It Today
You can read our original coverage of Versa from when it first debuted at Annecy right here at Fantasy Land News. For more Disney Animation and Disney+ coverage, visit fantasylandnews.com/category/entertainment/disney-animation/.
