Disney Rejected Her a Few Times. The ‘Wish’ Director Just Kept Trying.

At the turn of the century, a young medical student in Thailand mailed a handwritten letter to a Disney animator in Florida.

The student, Fawn Veerasunthorn, had attended a guest lecture by this visual effects animator, Paitoon Ratanasirintrawoot, years earlier at her Bangkok high school (his alma mater). She’d since graduated and was miserable in her first year of med school. But, she wondered, might he have advice on how she could switch careers, move to the United States and follow in his footsteps at Disney?

He wrote back with his email address and they struck up a correspondence, as he answered her questions, which ranged from “What is a portfolio?” and “Where did you go to college?” to “Do girls really work in animation?” and “Is this safe?”

At the time, the animation industry in their home country was small. “Not many people from Thailand even have a dream of working in animation, let alone at Disney,” said Ratanasirintrawoot, who counts “The Lion King,” “Mulan” and “Lilo & Stitch” among his credits. “But she was really determined.”

Spurred by that determination, Veerasunthorn dropped out of med school, moved across the Pacific for art school and pushed past multiple Disney rejections until she eventually got her foot in the door in 2011.

She’s spent the past 12 years climbing the ranks of Walt Disney Animation Studios: serving as a story artist — visualizing and sketching out how a script will translate onscreen — on “Frozen,” “Moana” and “Zootopia,” and leading a team as the head of story on “Raya and the Last Dragon.”