Copying the description of this video:
Ahead of its debut on April 27, Disney has shared a first look at footage from Songs in Sign Language, its collaboration with the Deaf West Theatre that reimagined and animated songs from Frozen 2, Encanto, and Moana 2 in American Sign Language (ASL).
Directed by veteran Disney animator/director Hyrum Osmond, the featured songs are “The Next Right Thing” (from Frozen 2), “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” (from Encanto), and “Beyond” (from Moana 2). Take a look at clips taken from each musical number, as well as behind-the-scenes b-roll footage that offers a look at the process.
Osmond, along with producers Heather Blodget and Christina Chen, worked in collaboration with artistic director DJ Kurs and the team at Los Angeles’ Tony Award-winning Deaf West Theatre to create the new versions of these songs. A special behind-the-scenes featurette will accompany its release.
Osmond led a team of more than 20 animators who worked with sign language reference expressly created for Disney Animation’s Songs in Sign Language. DJ Kurs, artistic director for Deaf West Theatre, worked with sign language reference choreographer Catalene Sacchetti and a group of eight performers from Deaf West Theatre, reimagining and choreographing lyrics into ASL by focusing on concepts and emotion instead of a word-for-word transcription.
Disney Animation’s Songs in Sign Language will be available on Disney+ on April 27, which coincides with National Deaf History Month.
Video/Photo Credit: Courtesy of Walt Disney Animation Studios
Some important notes: no """AI""" was used to make this. They literally took the actual assets from the movies and re-animated them in ASL. And it is ASL, not SEE or contact sign or anything else.
Something I find especially striking about this Disney project is that 11 months ago I made a post to /c/worldbuilding about an "Open Sign Language Animation Project" in the future: after the global socialist revolution, Japan established a state-owned animation studio that took over all the animation assets of Ghibli films and other classic anime. So this project of Disney's in the present day is sort of the closest thing to OSLAP in our time, and it proves that dubbing animated films into sign languages is feasible and something there is a real demand for. But imagine how much more accessible media could become if films' animation assets were made publicly available! That was the idea behind OSLAP: making animation assets publicly available for the purposes of dubbing formerly-copyrighted works into sign languages. Unlike Disney's ASL songs project, though, OSLAP had a limited usage of ML technology: first, 3D anime character rigs were created for traditional motion capture; and then each work in the project would also have a machine learning-based renderer created for it, to optionally convert the 3D rigs into the 2D anime style of the respective work (see this video).