Disney's Hexed directors explain why the film became a mother-daughter story

When Disney chief creative officer Jared Bush announced Hexedat the D23 fan event in 2025, the movie’s plot was described as “an awkward teenage boy and his Type A mom discover that what makes him unusual might just be magical powers that will turn their lives — and a secret world of magic — upside down.” But by the time the teaser trailer was released in June, the film had changed to following a teenage girl. At a roundtable interview at the Annecy Festival, directors Jason Hand and Fawn Veerasunthorn explained the change.

“A parent-child relationship was always the core of the story, and we found the strongest story was between a mother and a daughter,” Hand said. “It spoke to the idea of being a witch. It spoke to this empowerment that she was looking for.”

An Annecy preview provided a deeper look at the plot of Hexed, which will be released on November 25. Billie (Hailee Steinfeld) is a rebellious teen who doesn’t fit in at her high school. She’s having a particularly bad day when the bracelet her mom, Alice (Rashida Jones), made her promise to always wear falls off her wrist. As soon as it does, Billie starts manifesting the magical powers Alice has been suppressing since Billie was a baby. The directors promise that Hexed will feel different from the many other Disney films about teen girls questioning their family, like Moana, which Bush wrote, and Encanto, which he co-wrote and co-directed.

“There are archetypes of stories, the particular dynamic that exists throughout time that people gravitate to because it’s emotional to you,” Veerasunthorn said. “I think for us, the specificity in our main character’s situation and the specificity of the magic world system that we create is going to make this something that has its own uniqueness.”

Billie uses her new powers to open a portal into Hexe, a magical world established by witches who fled persecution and now live in harmony with nature. Billie is welcomed by a group of enchanted objects very reminiscent of the cursed servants in Beauty and the Beastand has to learn to master her abilities as she’s hunted by powerful witches with the ominous ability to turn into flocks of ravens. An unhappy kid discovering they’re meant to be part of a magical world is also the plot of Harry Potter and Disney’s The Owl House, but Veerasunthorn says Hexed will be very different.

“This story is about a young girl who discovers her true potential, and it’s not like the usual hero’s journey where she has to do it on her own,” she said. “In this film, the secret ingredient is her mom. I think that’s what sets it apart.”

Billie needs to learn about her family’s secrets in order to rescue her mother.

“As a daughter who is also fortunate enough to become a mother, I really love this opportunity to tell this story that makes us curious about the side of our mothers we never thought to ask about: the joy, the mischief, and the mistakes,” Veerasunthorn said. “A big part of who we are maybe started long before we were born.”