Ex-Pixar Employees Say Executives Repeatedly Asked to Make Inside Out 2 “Less Gay”
Disney
Pixar really doesn’t want you to think that Inside Out 2 protagonist Riley might be gay — at least, that’s what inside sources are claiming.
This week, IGN published a report in which 10 anonymous ex-Pixar employees detailed the hit animated movie’s arduous journey to the screen, which they say included seven-day work weeks for animators and last-minute rewrites. According to these sources, those rewrites included conscious efforts by some studio higher-ups to “avoid LGBTQ themes.”
The first trailer for Inside Out 2 featured a scene in which Riley is awestruck when she meets star hockey player Valentina “Val” Ortiz (played by mononymous actor Lilimar ) and awkwardly accepts Val’s invitation to sit at her lunch table. It’s a moment that I’d wager plenty of queer viewers can relate to, especially when it comes to their formative crushes and adolescent gay awakenings. Although the movie didn’t wind up being explicitly queer, Riley’s passionate efforts to win over the cool hockey girls — along with an allusion to a deep, dark secret — could be read as LGBTQ+ subtext.
But, according to IGN’s sources, Pixar executives wouldn’t be too pleased to hear that. Multiple people told the outlet that they heard about recurring studio notes to make Riley come across as “less gay” in the movie. This allegedly led to numerous rounds of edits aiming to make Riley and Val’s relationship appear “as platonic as possible,” including tweaks to the lighting and tone of some scenes to remove any hints of “romantic chemistry.”
“Mind you, Riley is not canonically gay,” one anonymous source told IGN. “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.”
Part of the answer to why Pixar was so afraid of including anything remotely gay can perhaps be traced back to the disappointment of the 2022 Toy Story spin-off Lightyear. After films like Soul, Luca, and Turning Red were all released directly on Disney+ amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Lightyear underperformed at the box office, earning a meager $226 million worldwide. While there were likely a wide number of reasons Lightyear didn’t strike a chord with audiences — it’s a spinoff movie that doesn’t feature most of Toy Story’s beloved characters, Buzz was voiced by actor Chris Evans instead of original star Tim Allen, et cetera — sources claimed to IGN that Disney executives placed a large portion of the blame for the movie’s poor performance on the film’s inclusion of a same-sex kiss.
The kiss in question occurs between supporting character Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) and her wife Kiko, and was cut from the movie before ultimately being restored following protest by LGBTQ+ employees of Pixar.
“Disney really said f\*\*k you to so many queer, POC, and non traditional Star Wars fans all bc this show got review bombed to hell and back before it even came out,” one X user posted.
“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,’” a source said. “That’s not the reason the movie failed.”
Of course, Disney has never exactly been a bastion of LGBTQ+ representation. Over the years, the mega-corporation has boasted about featuring queer characters, only for said characters to show up very briefly or their LBGTQ+ is barely alluded to. There’s the lesbian cyclops cop from Onward, the minor nonbinary lake character in Elemental, Josh Gad’s Le Fou dancing with another dude for a millisecond in 2017’s Beauty and the Beast… you get the picture. Still, IGN’s sources paint a disappointing picture of Pixar’s plans (or lack thereof) for actual LGBTQ+ representation moving forward. In the words of one former employee: “A lot of us accepted the fact that we may never see a major gay character in a Pixar movie.”
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