# Hexed: Disney’s Witch Realm Charms Thanksgiving
Every November, Disney Animation plants its flag on Thanksgiving, and this year’s flag is flying over a realm of witches. *Hexed*, the studio’s 65th animated feature, opens in theaters on November 25, and everything we have seen so far suggests it will be one of the season’s brightest family outings. The premise has a classic Disney spark: after getting expelled from school, Billie Doe, an impulsive, unconventional teenager who feels miscast in her own life, discovers magical abilities that pull her out of suburbia and into Hexe, a hidden realm of witches. Her cautious mother Alice comes along for the ride. What starts as a chosen-one story becomes something warmer and rarer: a mother-daughter adventure through the occult.
## What we know so far
The facts are confirmed and plentiful. Walt Disney Animation Studios is releasing *Hexed* exclusively in theaters on November 25, 2026. Hailee Steinfeld voices Billie, and Rashida Jones voices her mother Alice. Jodie Foster joins as Queen Celeste, the devious ruler of the witches, her first animated Disney role ever, which is remarkable this late into a career with two Oscars on the shelf. Walton Goggins voices Beef Roger Crumbchuck, a three-eyed green cat. Tracey Ullman plays Ms. Quill, an enchanted feather pen, and Stephen Fry plays Elias Quire, a talking magical journal. Yes, the office supplies have SAG cards. Yes, it is perfect.
Directors Fawn Veerasunthorn and Jason Hand helm the film, with Josie Trinidad co-directing and Roy Conli and Yvett Merino producing. The first trailer arrived in September, and Disney released its first standalone clip on September 30: Billie tries to conjure a path across a swamp and accidentally summons a giant many-eyed centipede instead. She rides it anyway. It is thirty-six seconds of exactly the right kind of magic.
## The talent behind it
### A voice cast with real spark
Steinfeld has become one of the most reliable voices in animation, with *Spider-Verse* and *Arcane* on her resume, and she specializes in heroines who are all sharp edges and soft centers. Billie sounds like her sweet spot: a girl who gets expelled from school in the first act and has to earn the audience back. Jones brings warmth and comic timing to Alice, the mother who very much did not sign up for a witch realm but refuses to let her daughter face it alone. The mother-daughter dynamic is the heart of the film, and the casting tells you Disney knows it.
Then there is Foster. Two Academy Awards, zero animated Disney villains, until now. Queen Celeste gives her a stage for the kind of grand, delicious menace she rarely gets to play. Goggins as a three-eyed green cat is simply inspired casting. He has cornered the market on characters who are stranger than they have any right to be, and a feline sidekick named Beef Roger Crumbchuck is the role he was born to voice.
### Directors who know Disney’s heart
Veerasunthorn co-directed *Wish* and has deep roots in the studio’s recent renaissance. Hand and Trinidad are longtime Disney story artists who have been shaping the studio’s films from the inside for years. This is a homegrown team, not a hired-gun crew, and *Hexed* has the feel of a film built by people who love the building. The coming-of-age fantasy framing, a girl who feels miscast in her own life finding the place where she is finally seen, is pure Disney thematic territory, handled by people who speak the language fluently.
## What to watch for
The early footage reveals a film with a playful sense of danger. That first clip is doing real work: it shows magic that goes wrong in funny ways, a heroine who improvises instead of panicking, and a world with genuine visual imagination. The swamp creature is creepy enough to thrill kids and charming enough to win over their parents. Several observers have already pegged *Hexed* as a potential gateway-horror movie in the tradition of *Hocus Pocus* and *The Nightmare Before Christmas*: spooky on the surface, warm underneath. That is a wonderful lane for a Thanksgiving release.
The world of Hexe itself is the other big draw. Disney’s recent animated worlds have been triumphs of design, and a realm of witches gives the artists a playground: strange architecture, eccentric creatures, magic with personality. Add family secrets with consequences for the whole witch world, and you have stakes that grow naturally out of character rather than being bolted on.
It is also worth noting the company *Hexed* keeps on Disney’s slate. The studio is in the middle of one of its busiest franchise stretches, with everything from Star Wars: Episode X in development at Lucasfilm to a live-action *Lilo & Stitch* sequel on the calendar. An original animated feature standing tall among all those returning giants says something about the studio’s confidence in the material. And in November, Disney is even pairing *Hexed* with a new *Lilo & Stitch* short, *Lilo & Scratch*, a double feature of fresh Disney animation that families will eat up.
## The verdict
*Hexed* has everything a great Disney Animation original needs: a heroine with a real point of view, a family story at its center, a world worth getting lost in, and a cast that sounds like it is having the time of its life. The trailer and first clip show a film confident enough to be funny, spooky, and sincere in the same breath. Thanksgiving cannot come fast enough.
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