Disney to Launch ‘ASL Re-Animated’ Songs
Tara Bennett at Cartoon Brew posted a first look story earlier this week wherein she writes about Disney’s “ASL Re-Animated” project. It takes songs from films such as Encanto, Frozen 2, and Moana 2 and shows them in ASL. The story has interviews with Disney animator and director Hyrum Osmond, as well as Deaf West Theatre artistic director DJ Kurs and sign language reference choreographer Catalene Sacchetti.
The ASL song project was announced last month and premieres Friday, April 27.
“Osmond said he spent years developing ideas for a project like this before finally pitching it to then Walt Disney Animation Studios CCO Jennifer Lee and current president Clark Spencer,” Bennett reported on Monday.
She continued: “A key stipulation was choosing recent films so the team could easily reload the animation assets, which led them to songs from Frozen 2, Moana 2, and Encanto. Osmond said considerable thought went into both the artistic results and ensuring variety among the songs.”
At a high level, Disney’s work here—there are songs on YouTube—strikes me as highly similar to likeminded endeavors like the National Hockey League’s “NHL × ASL” series and HBO Max’s ASL films. The common thread running through these projects, Disney’s included, is they want to make entertainment more inclusive to the Deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Take Disney’s ASL songs, for example. Music is inherently an aural medium, which ostensibly means it’s inaccessible to a Deaf person because they can’t hear. (Yes, deafness is a spectrum, but that's besides the point I'm emphasizing here.) Ergo, that Disney is making songs accessible to Deaf audiences means music is something they can experience and feel resonance towards. (This is also why adding transcripts to podcasts and podcast apps are so very worthwhile.)
As a CODA, I remember having to quasi-interpret pieces like the National Anthem at the Super Bowl for my football-loving Deaf dad because he never understood the song—or its lyrics. It was quite the challenge as a 10-year-old trying to lean into the TV to hear the music, then pulling back to interpret it for my father. The salient points are twofold: (1) there’s a lot of pressure being the eldest kid to be the in-house interpreter; and (2) modern technology, along with a growing sense of empathy towards disabled people, have made initiatives like Disney’s (and the NHL's and HBO Max's) possible. Suffice it to say, none of this existed during my formative years in the ‘90s. My 14-year-old self in 1995 yearned for something exactly like my 44-year-old self is writing about today.
