Disney’s ‘Versa’ Tells a Grieving Parent’s Story of Miscarriage

Trigger Warning: This article discusses infant loss, child loss, and grief.

We’ve heard it said that the smallest coffins are the heaviest to bear.

We’ve also learned that the term used for a parent whose child has died is vilomah, a Sanskrit word that literally means “against the natural order.”

A lot has been said and written in an attempt to capture a parents’ grief over losing a child, and yet it still isn’t enough to fully hold the weight of that pain.

Grief, and the healing that follows, is a deeply personal journey. And words, even those coming from the people closest to us, are sometimes not enough to ease the ache.

But when another parent expresses their grief and healing through a medium that is deeply personal to them, we can’t help but take notice and empathize.

Disney’s short animated film, “Versa,” is one such deeply personal story, told by a grieving parent: Walt Disney animator and director Malcon Pierce.

The film begins with Malcon sharing his story. While working on Moana, he and his wife, Keely, lost their infant son, Cooper, on the same day as his birthday.

“I remember the first day coming back to work and I decided that I’m gonna distract myself mentally, and just, you know, keep myself super occupied, like, everything’s fine,” Malcon shared. “And that was the thing, that was like, ‘Man, I’m so not fine.’”

“It’s a very personal story, and, you know, it’s scary, putting that out there, but I’ve found it more empowering to open up and share than try to avoid it.”

The short film opens with a celestial couple, each made of stars and stardust, each with a bright star within them. And within the woman;s tummy is another bright, beating star.

They dance and prepare the nursery, filling with life and happy hope for the new life growing within.

But in the next second, the light flickers out, and life is lost. In response, their own lights dim.

What follows is each of them coping with the grief of that loss, with the woman quite literally cracking apart. They dance together, then flee separately. The woman faces her grief. The man runs in the opposite direction and falls. Then he sees the woman, cracked, yet still whole and glowing.

Together, they face the nursery, their grief. And the man cracks.

And then, somehow, both are whole again.

And together, they dance and love once more.

Similar to the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where cracks in pottery were filled with gold, the cracked celestial beings symbolize who we become after grief. No one escapes grief unharmed, unchanged, or uncracked. And while we may still be whole, our grief will always remain a part of us.

In Variety, Malcon shared that the idea of grief cracking a person open deeply resonated with him. He said he first encountered it in the book “Permission to Mourn,” which was suggested to him by Frozen 2 co-director Chris Buck.

“I had always wanted to have these characters transform into a newer version of themselves,” he shared. “I think a lot of times when we think about characters having this devastation in their life, there’s an idea that you heal from it, and when you heal, you’re fixed. I feel like what I’ve learned is that grief, those steps, are a way for you to have a relationship with grief and to be able to keep those that you’ve lost much closer.”

He admits that he wasn’t keeping Cooper close after he passed. And when he was finally able to face him, by entering Cooper’s nursery after avoiding it for so long, Malcon said:

“I went in and split open. I was forced to face it. But there was a photo that we took after that where Keely and I are embracing each other and we’re smiling, and it’s this beautiful color photo.”

That gave him both the realization and the strength to see how he and his wife were becoming whole again after getting split apart by grief, and how healing can happen even as people continue to grow around their loss.

“That’s where we got the idea of incorporating the Japanese art of Kintsugi, this beautiful art where they fill cracks in pottery with gold. It’s symbolic. That was something that we really worked hard on—this idea of earning a relationship with grief and finding hope through the hard stuff.”

It can be hard to see anything else while in the throes of our grief.

And for parents who have experienced unimaginable loss, seeing that kind of pain reflected with honesty can feel deeply validating. Sometimes, simply being seen in our sorrow, without needing to explain it, can be its own quiet form of comfort and healing.

Stories like Versa remind us that healing does not mean forgetting, and wholeness does not mean being untouched by pain.

Sometimes, grief changes us forever. Sometimes, it cracks us open. 

And sometimes, what emerges from those cracks is not the person we once were, but someone softer, deeper, and still capable of love, light, and hope.

In that way, grief is not something we simply “get over.” It becomes something we carry, something we learn to live with, and, eventually, something we may even learn to hold with tenderness.

Here are some things you shouldn’t say to someone who has had a miscarriage.