Every language has its own nuances, and to view a movie in a language not your own can mean missing out on a layer of meaning. For hearing impaired viewers of animation, Director Hyrum Osmond wanted to change that. Growing up with a father who was deaf, he never learned sign language. He says he regrets that he couldn’t connect with his dad, and “with this project, I wanted to do something that could take down barriers.”
That “something” evolved into Songs in Sign Language, a Disney project in collaboration with Deaf West Theatre. It is a trilogy that takes animated musical sequences—“The Next Right Thing” from Frozen 2, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” from Encanto, and “Beyond” from Moana 2—and translates them into American Sign Language.
Focused on keeping the intention of the original songs, the team approached the process certain of one thing. “We didn’t want it to feel like the [sign language] animation was just slapped on,” says Animation Lead Joel Reid.
This required a unique degree of prep, beginning with Sign Language Reference Choreographer Catalene Sacchetti. Watching the existing animation, she says that she would “pay attention to [the character’s] thought processes and their emotions.” Then she examined the moods depicted in the words of the lyrics. Finally, she asked herself: “How would a deaf person express this based on that input from those two sources?”
In collaboration with the theater’s Artistic Director DJ Kurs, Sacchetti worked with eight performers, developing her translations until they were compatible with their movements. Osmond, in turn, ensured that the results remained true to the original character performances.
The resulting reference videos were given to 20-plus Character Animators working on the project. “It was up to each individual animator how they wanted to approach it,” says Reid, who notes that everyone was working with a starting point they wouldn’t normally have—a finished animated shot.
An animator could look at the original animation, and if they found something that worked, they could keep it. “Otherwise, they were allowed to start from scratch,” Reid says. “It was case by case,” just as long as the new version captured the spirit of the old. For example, “Beyond” starts out quietly, and Osmond says: “We had to be conscious of how subtle and soft [we were] with the signing. We had to make sure it wasn’t feeling too big for that moment.”
With sign language, a single sign can convey an entire idea or concept, and the animators had to keep this in mind as they worked with hands, which are notably complex to animate. Accurate finger placement was essential. This didn’t just mean getting finger movements right. It meant integrating those movements into the overall motion to make sure they could be seen clearly.
“There were difficulties if the character spun around because we had to make sure that you could always see the hands when you needed to,” Reid says. In “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” the most challenging of the three songs, “there’s so much choreography and movement embedded into the scene already,” says Sacchetti. “Everyone is moving onscreen, offscreen, but we’re still hearing their voices.” This might require whirling a dancer so that her back is to her partner, and while he holds her, her hands are free to sign.
Choices were also made to use signs with movements that complemented the emotion of the moment. An instance that stands out for Reid relates to the original script when Moana says: “This is bigger than Motunui—bigger than us.” She is talking about connecting with people on other islands and bringing everyone together. Reid says that when the team translated the line, they had to think about what Moana meant by “this.” In the translation, Moana signs: “Motunui isn’t the only one.” While this different angle captures the same concept, “visually it feels better,” Reid says.
Throughout each step, logistics and the cinematic side had to “play nice together,” says Osmond, who used a different camera at times and often had to shoot closer than in the original scene to make the signs clear. Then there was an issue Reid discovered once a scene was shot. “When we followed the live-action reference frame by frame, often the motion was too fast to read in the animation,” he says. “With the sound on, it also gave a sense of slowing time, which could mask what was truly legible. By turning the sound off, we could see the movements more clearly, giving us a better sense of which signs were legible and which needed a few more frames. Once we had that working, we could then turn the sound back on and adjust to hit the musical beats if desired.”
A sense of responsibility to the deaf community underscored the production of Songs in Sign Language, and it turned out that animation is well suited to meet this responsibility. “There’s so much creativity and freedom and flexibility that goes into animation,” Sacchetti says. “In sign language you have the same kind of flexibility.” To this Osmond adds: “Sign language is a cinematic language in and of itself. It was a natural fit.”
