Disney gives in to pressure from the LGBTQ community working at Pixar and restores a censored scene from Lightyear footage
On March 9, Pixar Animation Studios’ LGBTQ employees and allies sent a joint statement to Walt Disney Company leaders asserting that Disney executives had actively censored the “openly gay affection” in his feature films. The shocking allegation, made as part of a larger outcry over the company’s lack of public response to the proposed leand “Don’t say gay” of Florida, did not include which Pixar films had weathered censorship, nor which specific creative decisions were cut or altered.
But in at least one case, the declaration appears to have made a significant difference.
According to Variety, a source close to the production, Pixar’s next feature film, Lightyear, Originally starring Chris Evans, it features a major female character, Hawthorne (voiced by Uzo Aduba), who is in a significant relationship with another woman. While the fact of that relationship was never questioned in the studio, a kiss between the characters in the film was cut. However, after the uproar surrounding the statement by Pixar employees and the handling of the bill “Don’t Say Gay” by the CEO of Disney, Bob Chapekthe kiss was reinstated in the film last week.
The decision marks a potentially major turning point for LGBTQ representation not only in Pixar films, but in animation in general, which has remained staunchly circumspect about depicting same-sex affection in significant ways.
To be sure, there are several examples of direct LGBTQ representation in animated films created for an adult audience, including “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut” from 1999, “Persepolis” from 2007, “Sausage Party” from 2016 and «flee». But in an animated film rated G or PG, the dominant approach has been to tell, not show, and hardly that. Arguably the most prominent LGBTQ character in an animated studio film to date has been Katy (Abbi Jacobson), the teenage protagonist of The Mitchells vs. the Machinesproduced by Sony Pictures Animation and released by Netflix, is the exception that proves the rule: this explicit fact of Katie’s identity is only fully revealed in the final moments of the film when her mother makes a brief reference to her girlfriend.
In Pixar’s 27-year history, there have been very few LGBTQ characters. On Onwards 2020, a one-eyed policewoman (Lena Waithe), who appears in some scenes, mentions her girlfriend. On Toy Story 4 2019, two moms say goodbye with a hug to their son in kindergarten. AND Finding Dory from 2016 features a brief shot of what appears to be a lesbian couple, though the filmmakers of the film were coy about defining them that way at the time. The most openly LGBTQ project in the Pixar canon is a 2020 short film, Outabout a gay man struggling to come out to his parents, which the studio released on Disney Plus as part of its SparkShorts program.
But according to several former Pixar employees who spoke anonymously with Variety, creatives within the studio have been trying for years to incorporate LGBTQ identity into their storytelling in ways big and small, only for those efforts to be constantly thwarted.
In Pixar’s 2021 release, Lucatwo young sea monsters who appear human when on land, Luca (Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), build a deep friendship that many interpret as an allegory of coming out of the closet: The New York Times film review It is title Calamari by Your Name«. The film’s director, Enrico Casarosa, even told The Wrap that “talked about” the potential of Luca and Alberto’s friendship as romantic in nature. But she quickly added that “We don’t talk about it as much because the film focuses on friendship” And it is “pre-romance”.
“Some people seem to get mad that I’m not saying yes or no, but I feel like, well, this is a movie about being open to any differences.”Casarosa added.
However, it seems that also the filmmakers of Luca they also discussed whether the human girl Luca and Alberto befriends, Giulia (Emma Berman), should be queer. But the creative team seemed to be stuck on how to do it without also creating a girlfriend for the character.
“Very often we find ourselves with the question of ‘How do we do this without giving them a love interest?’”said the source who worked in the study. “That comes up very often at Pixar.”
It’s not clear why a studio that has infused multidimensional life into everything from plastic toys to the concepts of sadness and joy would be stumped on how to create an LGBTQ character without a love interest. But it also seems like Pixar has had a hard time incorporating queer representation even as part of the background. Multiple sources told Variety that efforts to include symbols of LGBTQ identity in the design of movie sets set in specific American cities known for sizable LGBTQ populations were unsuccessful, the source going so far as to mention that the studio ordered a sticker removed from rainbow placed in a shop window because it was considered that “distracted” These same sources also claim that same-sex couples were also removed from the background of movies.
More troubling is how this censorship apparently manifested itself in the studio. The March 9 statement from Pixar employees states that the “Disney corporate reviews” they were responsible for the decline of LGBTQ representation at Pixar, which would include the tenure of Chapek’s predecessor as CEO, Robert Iger. That’s why Pixar employees say they found Chapek’s claim in a March 7 company-wide memo that the “greater impact” that Disney can have “it is through the inspiring content that we produce”.
“Nearly every moment of openly gay affection is cut at Disney’s behest, regardless of when there are protests from both Pixar’s creative teams and executive leadership.”said the statement. “Even if creating LGBTQIA+ content was the answer to fixing discriminatory legislation around the world, we are prohibited from creating it.”
The examples of Luca, Soul and Inside Out they were allegedly driven by the individual film’s making team or the studio itself. So Pixar would have been self-censoring because of the abiding belief that LGBTQ content wouldn’t pass Disney’s review, because Disney needed movies to play in markets traditionally hostile to LGBTQ people: namely China, Russia, much from western Asia and South America.
In fact, the inclusion of a one-eyed lesbian policewoman in Onwards it was enough to ban the film in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia; and the version released in Russia changed the word bride for the word couple.
So with all this background, it makes the decision to restore same-sex kissing to Lightyearthe first Pixar film to open in theaters instead of Disney Plus since 2019, be that much more meaningful for the studio and its employees, especially those who took the risk of breaking Pixar’s nearly impenetrable silence on internal affairs in their declaration of March 9.
For Steven Hunter, the director of the short film Out, that effort was particularly important. While he is no longer at Pixar and was unable to discuss any specific cases of censorship there, she said he was still “distressing” talk about the company. But with equal LGBTQ rights under threat from a sudden flurry of state-level laws, the importance of visibility in storytelling was too great for him to remain silent.
“I support my colleagues”Hunter said. “I am so proud of those people for speaking up. We need that. We need Mr. Chapek to understand that we need to talk. We cannot assume that these laws that they are trying to implement are not harmful, bigoted and, frankly, evil. We are not going. We are not going back to the closet.”
Here we present the trailer of the film
What do you think of the decision to restore the kiss between characters of the same sex?