Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Versa’ on Disney+, a Heartbreaking Short Film About an Animator Openly Expressing His Grief – and Hope

Published March 30, 2026, 5:00 p.m. ET

Keep your hand poised over the tissue box while you watch Versa (now streaming on Disney+), a profoundly heartfelt animated short that’s just as heartrending. It’s written and directed by Malcon Pierce, a Disney animator whose credits include Moana, the Frozen movies, Encanto and many of the studio’s recent non-Pixar films – and who went through a grievous real-life event that spurred him to make this beautiful tearjerker of a film.

VERSA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: There is no dialogue in Versa, only imagery. Colorful, gorgeous, poignant imagery. The unnamed man and woman characters in this film are both enormous and tiny – living in a rainbow-colored galaxy, they’re dwarfed by ethereal nebulae, but they’re large enough to cup a planet in their hands like a captured firefly. The man approaches the woman to show her the teensy Saturn-like celestial body in his palm, and as she turns to him, we see her pregnant belly.

Within these near-transparent people are twinkling stars where their hearts lie. Of course, there are two within the woman. But a mysterious occurrence precipitates the flickering, then dimming of the star inside her. There’s silence. They glide atop the interstellar clouds, expressing themselves with grand gestures like Olympic ice dancers. A midnight-blue crack spreads in her chest, and they go their separate ways. Can the crack be healed? Is there a way through this tragedy?

Photo: Disney Plus

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Versa is almost – almost – as devastating as the Carl-and-Ellie all-timer of a montage at the beginning of Up. 

Performance Worth Watching: In a brief intro to the film, Pierce shares how opening himself up to grief after a period of being closed-off, helped him persevere through tragedy.

Sex And Skin: None.

Photo: Disney+

Our Take: Without “spoiling” this affecting 12-minute short, Pierce comes up with simple, poetic and devastatingly effective ways to visually represent grief, pain and perseverance – the latter perhaps being the keyword here. Despite its brevity, Versa doesn’t put forth simplistic notions of healing, but a more evolved sense of how we need to live with grief rather than denying or confronting it. It’s similar to one of the core elements of meditation, where you let a negative thought or feeling exist rather than push it away.

The film’s aesthetic is unsurprisingly similar to the Disney standard represented by Pierce’s list of credits (he’s been an animator or supervising animator for multiple projects, and most recently was head of animation for the series Iwaju). Inspired by the loss of he and his wife Keely’s newborn son, and the photographic works she created to work through her grief, Pierce balances the magical, fairy tale-like elements of classic Disney animation — you’ll be hard-pressed not to invoke when you wish upon a star here — with the crushingly earthbound nature of the story itself. It concludes with a moment of hope, because that’s Pierce’s story – and maybe because it absolutely has to.

My only criticism is the Disney+ presentation of Versa, which frontloads an interview with Pierce, who outlines its themes; it’d be best to skip it and go into the short blind, and let the emotions wash over you.

Our Call: We can set aside our cynicism about Hollywood bulldozing us with so many films about grief and loss (don’t call it “traumacore”) – there’s plenty of room for this very small film about very large emotions. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.