Songs in Sign Language is a new project from Disney that does exactly what its name suggests. The company is reanimating three popular songs from its films with American Sign Language (ASL) to make them more accessible for viewers who are deaf and hard of hearing.
The Songs in Sign Language collection will debut on Disney+ on April 27, but Disney has released some sneak peeks ahead of time. The three songs that have been reanimated with ASL are “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” from Encanto, “The Next Right Thing” from Frozen 2, and “Beyond” from Moana 2.
Over twenty animators worked alongside artistic director DJ Kurs, sign language reference choreographer Catalene Sacchetti and eight performers from Deaf West Theatre. They “carefully reimagined and choreographed lyrics into ASL by focusing on concepts and emotion instead of a word-for-word transcription,” according to Disney. “In the majority of cases, we created entirely new animation,” added Hyrum Osmond, Disney animator and director who led the project. “There were a lot of adjustments that we had to do within the animation to be true to the original intention.”
