In the Spring of 1996, Paula was invited to participate along with 9 other artists and filmakers in the Spellbound exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London. The work created would deal with the relationship between art and cinema. Paula, whose favorite form of entertainment is still film, enthusiatically accepted. Her father had owned Portugal's first private cinema and it was there she saw her first Disney films and has described it as "the discovery of a new world.". To this day she acknowledges Disney as having the biggest impact and influence on her art and she regards him as the greatest pictorial genius of the 20th century. To gather ideas for the work Paula took Lila Nunes to the movies to see her old childhood favorites. Originally she had wanted to do a picture about Carmen Miranda, but she accidently sat through Flying Down to Rio which doesn't feature Miranda. So after that she turned her attention towards Disney films, specifically the Dance of the Ostriches in Fantasia. For the movie, animators used real ballerinas to model the dancing ostriches off of. Paula reversed this process and turned them back into women. Lila was the only model used for these works, sometimes appearing alone and other times with an entire flock of herself. Paula's son Nicholas says of Paula and Lila "they are very much alike in their Portugueseness. It is a question of humour, a certian toughness and blunt lack of sentimentality." The instinctive understanding betweeen the artist and the model allowed Paula to complete the series within the short amount of time given. Although all the ostriches are Lila, Paula portrays her in so many different ways that it is difficult for anyone except those who know her very well to recognize her. Paula considers the figures grotesque, a word she carefully distinguishes from caricature. Caricatures are mockeries while grotesque describes the dark, secret vulnerable side of the human character. Lila says " The Ostriches are formed in a very deep feeling. They are the result of going through a lot of feelings and getting to the essence of them. I have these feelings but I'm younger and they're mixed up. Paula concentrates many feelings maybe that's why they become more difficult as they get older. Feelings almost too dark to speak of. I think women accept their feelings more than men. They're more open about them, they talk more about them with each other. A man will say 'Everything's fine' when it isn't" Continuing her coverage of Disney for Spellbound, Paula also created works which were her own unique interpretations of Snow White and Pinnochio. In these works she gets right down to the core of the stories the feelings between the characters and the images she produced offer a new way of looking at these stories.
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