Name: Candleshoe
Released: 1977

Jodie Foster grew up on the Disney lot. Long before her two Oscars, the studio cast her as a child in live-action comedies such as Freaky Friday and Candleshoe, yet nobody ever put her voice inside one of the animated features that define the company. Hexed finally closes that loop, and the way it does says something about how Walt Disney Animation Studios now uses star casting: not as a name on the poster, but as a performance its animators build into a character’s face.

Foster voices Queen Celeste in the studio’s new original feature, which follows Billie (Hailee Steinfeld), a teenager whose hidden magic pulls her and her cautious mother, Alice (Rashida Jones), out of the suburbs and into a witch realm called Hexe. As Deadline reported from the film’s panel at its Contenders Los Angeles event at the DGA Theater, co-writer Jared Bush, who co-directed Zootopia and Encanto and now serves as the studio’s chief creative officer, called landing her “a miracle.”

Bush argued that the part demanded someone of her stature. “Queen Celeste is an incredibly nuanced character,” he said. “It requires an actor of a caliber that is on Jodie’s level, which is the very top.” He admitted he went into their first conversation intimidated and braced for a hard sell that never came. About five minutes in, he recalled, Foster told him: “No, this is great. I’ve never done it. This seems like fun. Let’s get in that room.”

In the recording booth, Bush said, she was “down to try anything,” and she would finish a take by asking whether he had liked it. “I’m like: ‘I don’t know, Jodie Foster. Yes, I think I do like that performance, Jodie Foster, that seems great,’” he said.

Her most lasting mark on the film is visual. “[The animators] put Jodie Foster’s smile on Queen Celeste because it’s so iconic, and you really feel her performance in that,” Bush said, calling the process “this really fun back-and-forth between the actor, the writing and our animators to get those characters right.”

The panel also featured screenwriter Dana Ledoux Miller, who shares the writing credit with Bush. Jason Hand and Fawn Veerasunthorn direct, and the voice cast includes Walton Goggins, Tracey Ullman, Stephen Fry and Henry Winkler. Hexed was one of 15 films presented at Contenders Los Angeles, Deadline’s showcase for awards-season hopefuls. It opens in US theaters on November 25, then reaches most of Europe and Latin America over the following days and Japan on December 4. Deadline plans to post the full panel video on Monday.

Fifty years after Freaky Friday put a young Foster inside someone else’s body, Disney has pulled off the reverse: an animated queen who wears her grin.

Tags: animation, Jodie Foster, awards season, Hailee Steinfeld, Jared Bush, Hexed