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Numerous former Pixar employees are claiming that Disney was incredibly concerned that the studio’s blockbuster film Inside Out 2 would be “too gay” and that the project was micromanaged to ensure that no one could take any hint of LGBTQIA+ themes from it. That seems to have utterly failed.
Credit: Pixar
IGN has published an extensive behind-the-scenes examination of Inside Out 2, speaking to 10 anonymous former Pixar Animation Studios employees who were laid off in the lead-up to the release of the film. According to the former staffers, the production crunch around the sequel to the beloved 2015 Pete Docter film was enormously stressful, with one saying that “animators were working seven days a week. Ridiculous amounts of production workers, just people being tossed into jobs they’d never really done before… It was horrendous.”
Pixar had good reason to be nervous at the time. The COVID-19 pandemic had decimated box office grosses for every studio, and the last three Pixar feature films, Soul (2020), Luca (2021), and Turning Red (2022), had all been released straight to the Disney+ streaming service. The prevailing feeling among workers was apparently that if Inside Out 2 flopped, the entire studio was at risk.
“That was the pressure felt by everybody. We need this movie to succeed because we won’t have a studio [otherwise].’ And that is the pressure that everybody felt the whole time. The whole time. Even now, I think people are gone, still feeling that pressure of like, ‘Oh my God, we did it. We did it.’”
Credit: Pixar
Related: Disney Finally Announces ‘Inside Out 2’ Streaming Date!
It is thus somewhat bizarre that in this high-pressure environment, a disproportionate amount of feedback from Disney to Pixar was to make sure that the film wasn’t “too gay.” Former employees say that the failure of the Toy Story spinoff Lightyear (2022), which contained a (checks notes) two-second kiss from two supporting as part of a montage, was blamed on including “LGBTQIA+ themes.”
One staffer asserts that still is a prevalent feeling at Disney, saying, “It is, as far as I know, still a thing, where leadership, they’ll bring up Lightyear specifically and say, ‘Oh, Lightyear was a financial failure because it had a queer kiss in it.’ That’s not the reason the movie failed.”
Boy do I have news for them if they think a two second kiss in a montage is why Lightyear bombed… https://t.co/di07FLSGfz pic.twitter.com/d4AY23LvNt
— TRAFON(s Backup Account) (@RiseFallNickBck) September 16, 2024
Related: All the Feels! New ‘Inside Out 2’ Merchandise Set to Debut at Walt Disney World and Disneyland
Regardless of whether that caused the failure of Lightyear (it didn’t), Disney apparently gave director Kelsey Mann (and Pete Docter, who was officially executive producer and rumored to have essentially co-directed the movie) “continuous notes” to make Riley (Kensington Tallman) “less gay.” IGN reports:
“[T]here was special care put into making the relationship between Riley and Val, a supporting character introduced in Inside Out 2, seem as platonic as possible, even requiring edits to the lighting and tone of certain scenes to remove any trace of “romantic chemistry.” One source describes it as ‘just doing a lot of extra work to make sure that no one would potentially see them as not straight.'”
Credit: Pixar
Inside Out 2 was a huge box office success and is now the highest-grossing animated film of all time so that horrendous production crunch worked out well for the shareholders (if not the laid-off employees who were denied bonuses). Ironically, the movie was immediately clocked by audiences for its supposedly gay themes; one employee said, “Mind you, Riley is not canonically gay. In the film, what you saw, nothing about Riley says that she is gay, but it is kind of inferred based on certain contexts. And so that is something that they tried to play down at multiple points.”
Is Inside Out 2 a gay movie? Tell us your thoughts below!
