Disney Animation and Deaf West Theatre's Songs in Sign Language, three musical sequences animated in American Sign Language (ASL), will be launched on April 27, starting a new form of art that might become a standard in the future.

For now, you can enjoy some glimpses of how the animations were made using data from the original source files of “The Next Right Thing” from Frozen 2, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” from Encanto, and “Beyond” from Moana 2.

The performances were done with guidance and choreography from Deaf West Theatre artistic director DJ Kurs and sign language reference choreographer Catalene Sacchetti, as noted by Cartoon Brew.

The idea was born from the director Hyrum Osmond's experience with his Deaf father:

“Growing up, I never learned sign language,” he said. “I felt a lot of regret because I could not connect with my dad. With this project, I just wanted to do something that could take down barriers.”

He then pitched it to Disney and started a team of 20 animators who volunteered to bring the project to life. Osmond chose the three songs because he wanted "something with a lot of high energy and something a little more subtle. But also, we tell stories from all over the world, so let’s incorporate that."

Shaping these experiences in ASL required some creative choices: "In sign language, there might be one word and many, many ways of signing it, with different handshapes to convey meaning. So how do you convey this in the best possible way? Because of that, we really needed a team approach, multiple opinions and voices in the room, and that was critical to the process," said Sacchetti.

“We made sure that the signing choices for one particular character would be repeated for that character, but not necessarily for another. In the real world, not all Deaf people sign the same way. Some are fast signers. Some are slow. Some are high-energy. Some are more low-key. We wanted to apply that concept.”

The Encanto scene has a lot of characters, and the team had 8 performers signing in one frame, adding personalized touches here and there: “It was a lot of adjustments and improvisation, and a lot of learning in the moment about what was going to happen,” Kurs said. “For example, going down the hallway, you see three different characters signing ‘no’ in three different ways – different voices saying the same thing. We’re very grateful to Hyrum for giving us the license to work within those parameters and fill those moments with authenticity.”

Animators took the original data and recreated it with new gestures. Yining Karl Li, rendering engineer at Disney Animation, shared the process on X/Twitter:

He also highlighted that the animations were not AI-generated but made with care from many talented people:

Hopefully, we will have whole animated movies signed one day, as aid for Deaf people but also as a new type of entertainment.

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