Hexed directors shut down claims the Disney movie was made for vertical video: “bizarre and not true”
When the Hexed trailer dropped, the internet accused Disney of framing the movie for phone-sized vertical clips. The directors say that’s flat wrong. Their pushback opens up a bigger question: are shows now being built to be chopped into social media clips?
When the trailer for Disney’s new animated movie Hexed arrived, a chunk of the internet had the same reaction: this looks like it was framed for your phone. The directors say that is just plain wrong.
In a new interview, the filmmakers pushed back hard on the idea that they designed the movie for vertical, social-media-friendly clips. But the accusation itself points to something real that’s happening across film and TV. Here’s what they said, and the bigger trend behind it.
What the directors actually said
The pushback was blunt, and a little surprised.
Hexed is Walt Disney Animation’s 65th feature, out November 25, directed by Fawn Veerasunthorn (Wish) and Jason Hand (Moana 2). It follows Billie, a prickly teen (voiced by Hailee Steinfeld) who discovers she has magic and gets swept into a strange world alongside her mother.
When its first trailer landed, online discourse latched onto the idea that the movie was framed around vertical, phone-shaped content. Speaking to Cartoon Brew at the Annecy animation festival, the directors said that caught them completely off guard.
“I wasn’t expecting that one,” Hand said. He called the claim “bizarre and not true,” and predicted it would “go away naturally” once people saw more of the film’s actual cinematography.
Their defense: every frame is intentional
Their core argument is that the framing people questioned is the opposite of careless, it’s deliberate.
Veerasunthorn explained that the team obsesses over composition for storytelling reasons, not social-media ones. “We put so much intention into every frame when it comes to where the characters stand and what surrounds them,” she said. “We’re asking, ‘Does she feel free at this moment? Is she restricted?’”
Hand added that the movie actually plays with aspect ratio on purpose, changing how the world feels to Billie depending on the moment. In other words, what looked to some like phone-friendly framing is, they say, intentional visual storytelling, the frame tightening or opening up to match the character’s emotional state.
One important detail: the criticism was aimed at the trailer, not the finished film. The directors believe the full footage, with its wider, more cinematic shots, makes the whole accusation fall apart.
Why people made the assumption in the first place
Here’s the thing, though: the accusation didn’t come from nowhere. It came from a real anxiety about where entertainment is heading.
Audiences have gotten used to a world where a huge amount of what they watch is short, vertical, and built for phones, TikToks, Reels, YouTube Shorts. So people have become suspicious, watching for signs that “real” movies and shows are being quietly reshaped to feed that machine.
When viewers squint at a trailer and think “that looks made for a phone,” what they’re really worried about is bigger: that the stuff they love is being designed for distracted, scrolling, clip-sized consumption instead of for sitting down and actually watching.
The bigger trend: shows built to be clipped
And that worry isn’t paranoid. There’s a genuine shift happening in how TV and movies get made.
More and more, shows seem engineered for clippability, built so that individual moments pop out of context as shareable social media clips. A big dramatic line, a meme-able reaction, a shocking twist designed to rack up views when it’s ripped out and posted. The “moment” becomes the point, sometimes more than the whole.
You can see why. Streaming services live and die by buzz, and a scene that goes viral on TikTok is free marketing worth millions. So there’s real pressure to write and shoot for those extractable moments, the bit that’ll trend, the line that’ll caption well, the visual that screenshots perfectly.
Critics argue this can come at a cost: stories that feel like a string of “moments” rather than a coherent whole, paced for a phone rather than a couch. It’s the entertainment version of writing headlines for clicks.
Where Hexed fits in
So what does this have to do with a Disney witch movie? Everything and nothing.
Hexed itself, by its directors’ account, is the opposite of that trend, a film where framing is fussed over for story, not for social shares. If they’re right, the irony is sharp: a movie crafted with old-school cinematic care got accused of the very modern sin it was avoiding.
But the fact that the accusation stuck, even briefly, even wrongly, shows how primed audiences now are to suspect it. We’ve reached a point where viewers see a trailer and immediately wonder if they’re being fed phone-content in disguise. That instinct says less about Hexed and more about the era it’s arriving in.
The directors are betting the finished film puts the whole thing to rest. We’ll find out November 25 when Hexed hits theaters, framed, they promise, for the big screen, not the small one. In a world increasingly built for the scroll, a movie made for sitting still and actually watching might be the most rebellious thing of all.
Article compiled with the help of the Pirates & Princesses newsroom.
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Hat Tips:
Cartoon Brew (June 28, 2026), Ryan Gaur’s Annecy interview, verified for the directors’ “bizarre and not true” denial, the “I wasn’t expecting that one” and “caught me off guard” reactions, the “intention into every frame / does she feel free or restricted” defense, and the aspect-ratio detail
The Walt Disney Company and Variety (June 2026), verified for Hexed as Disney Animation’s 65th feature, the November 25 release, the Veerasunthorn/Hand direction, and the Steinfeld/Jones voice cast