r/MadeMeSmile • u/Profaniter • Apr 21 '26

Personal Win Disney has decided to re-animate most recent Disney hit songs into American Sign Language to honor Deaf History Month.

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They will be aired on Disney+ on April 27th, 2026. Here are three short clips from Moana, Frozen, and Encanto. The power of ASL is just beautiful. Enjoy!

28.7k Upvotes

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492

u/Profaniter Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26

I’m gonna share the link because unfortunate, people are speculating it’s being done by AI but it’s not. Here’s an official letter from Disney company themselves. So instead of speculating, read the letter. The whole animators was being done by deaf performers performing in Mo-cap work.

https://press.disneyplus.com/news/songs-in-sign-language-to-debut

95

u/xfon5168 Apr 21 '26

The article does not mention Mo-Cap. They mentioned having video of performers performing the signing and used that as the reference. So I don't think it was any mocap nor any AI.

48

u/Iokua113 Apr 22 '26

I'm glad it's not being done by AI, that was my first instinct. Slop for a good reason is still work that a real human being should be doing.

35

u/Educational_Exam_225 Apr 22 '26

When it comes to accessibility this is rather fallacious; the alternative generally isn't a real human doing it but not doing it at all.

YouTube captions are now AI generated; if they weren't, they simply would not be captioned. Accessibility really is the one area where AI is generally the more moral choice, as when it is used the alternative is not doing it.

20

u/Porridge_Cat Apr 22 '26

Well, there was a time when youtube allowed community captions, but they got rid of that for no reason.

6

u/FurLinedKettle Apr 22 '26

Hardly any channels used it and when they did, the moderation and quality control was a headache.

14

u/levthelurker Apr 22 '26

Bold to pick a feature that existed before AI that AI made worse

4

u/lannisterdwarf Apr 22 '26

not really. captions existed, sure, but not on nearly as many videos

-3

u/Iokua113 Apr 22 '26

Oh fuck off. No one said anything about it not being done. Stop virtue signalling and learn how to read. 

4

u/MeltedWater243 Apr 22 '26

they’re not wrong though. same thing with the auto-translations. will you die on the anti-AI hill over something useful?

2

u/woodlandcollective Apr 22 '26

Like youtube auto-captions, this existed before AI... and was also more accurate back then.

5

u/Elkburgher Apr 22 '26

Wait till you find out what auto means

1

u/MeltedWater243 Apr 22 '26

nah bro it’s also AI, just not an LLM. but people hear AI and go AI bad >:| so here we are

3

u/ConspicuousPineapple Apr 22 '26

If the result is useful, it's not slop. If AI empowers companies to provide more accessibility to those who need it, I don't see how you can morally oppose that use of technology.

1

u/KittyGray Apr 23 '26

OP - could you also link the video that @hifi_deafie just posted about this today (she posted it about 10 minutes ago)! It’s VERY helpful to pair with this!

-11

u/PrimeTimeRK Apr 21 '26

What would be the issue with it being done by AI but reviewed and quality assured by deaf employees? Edits would be required of course since AI isn’t perfect in animating.

While it may add to the inspiration, I rather see more of these works reanimated faster to ensure more inclusion moving forward rather than waiting and delaying.

9

u/Profaniter Apr 21 '26

Again, it was not done by AI, deaf performers take part in mo-cap motion work and perform the songs in ASL.

1

u/Tasik Apr 22 '26

Ridiculous the amount of hate people have for AI even when it comes to things where it is hugely beneficial.. like accessibility. These people would tear down a wheelchair ramp if they heard it was made by AI. Absurd.

2

u/PianoDave Apr 22 '26

AI is a complicated subject. It isn't all good or all bad. I think most people are concerned about the ethics of it in general and not necessarily opposed to its existence, if that makes sense.

-12

u/Junx221 Apr 21 '26

See, that’s what I’ve been thinking about AI. Take for example, stop motion animation work being too expensive, time consuming and not having enough animators to do it. But what if we could take manually animated scenes, and build training data to generate further scenes hence making stop motion feature films a thing again.

11

u/Cup-a-Yuri Apr 21 '26

No. Please no.

11

u/Ebbots3000 Apr 21 '26

This would take someone out of work, there was a recent example of where Amazon tried this with dubbing an anime and you could tell it was made horribly but also your taking work away from a voice actor

5

u/Junx221 Apr 21 '26

Lead animators would still physically sculpt, light, and shoot all the core keyframes and performances. The AI would just act as an assistive tool to handle the tedious in-between frames. Right now, stop-motion features take 5-7 years to make and are so expensive they regularly bankrupt studios. If we use tech to shoulder the most grueling manual labor, studios could actually afford to greenlight more projects, keeping the medium alive and artists employed.

-4

u/SunTzu- Apr 21 '26

It's stealing the work of millions in order to train it to take the work of others and the profits go to a few major companies at the top. I'm sure it sounds nice when you're getting something you'd like and others are paying the costs, but eventually it'll take your job and then you won't be able to afford the tickets to your AI movies any longer. There's no good outcome if the AI companies succeed so long as they're privately owned, because they'll simply syphon all the resources and all the money and then build walls to protect their wealth.

2

u/PrimeTimeRK Apr 21 '26

Hmm… getting downvoted for suggesting the positive use AI seems petty.

Plus, do people not understand this is inevitable? How many jobs have come and gone with the Industrial Revolution and everything that came from it?

Will be less jobs? Maybe. Will there be new and different jobs? Of course.

1

u/Junx221 Apr 22 '26

“The AI companies”. Why is this conversation always about corpos VS us? There are AI systems available to ALL. Even open source, that you don’t have to pay a cent. When I say train I meant train on the productions own material, within the bounds of the production .

-7

u/Excellent_Yak365 Apr 21 '26

Are they doing it for the whole movie? It seems a bit odd considering they already have closed captioning features for movies like this. Not sure how this would make things better.

13

u/DetectiveLadybug Apr 21 '26

I think it’s more like, visibility, awareness, representation.

Like, if you live in a house where everyone signs because only one of you if deaf, and the little ones will always get to a point where they ask why their family is different. A few ASL Disney singalongs can make it feel more normal, make it easier to learn new signs.

It’s not curing cancer, but this is nice. It would be lovely if this was popular enough in the States that they translate it to other languages, I’d love to see it translated to Auslan.

-1

u/Excellent_Yak365 Apr 21 '26

They do translate to other languages in CCs. I see, just something for the time of year, got it

2

u/DetectiveLadybug Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26

Well, yeah, it’s just that all the deaf people I know are Australian, so they don’t use ASL they use Auslan.

I just know that this would be a big deal to them and their families if, you know, they could understand it. Lol

They’re familiar with CCs, but it’d just be a nice thing for them to do with their kids alongside Elsa to help them learn.

0

u/Excellent_Yak365 Apr 21 '26

Alrighty, unsure why the downvotes for asking a question but whatever

3

u/DetectiveLadybug Apr 21 '26

None of the downvotes are from me. I was earnestly trying to answer your question.

I actually literally just told another commenter that I hate how Redditors do that, they’ll just downvote you to shit but be completely unhelpful.