According to a new report, in an apparent attempt to avoid any controversy surrounding the film’s release, Disney responded to the original draft of Inside Out 2 by asking Pixar to rewrite the script in order to make teenage protagonist Riley Anderson came across as “less gay”.
This supposed Disney directive was first revealed to the public courtesy of numerous and allegedly now-former Pixar employees who spoke to IGN‘s Alex Steadman regarding the studio’s purported less-than-stable status.
“I think for a month or two, the animators were working seven days a week,” said an insider in reference to what one of their colleagues described as “the largest crunchy in the studio’s history”.
“Ridiculous amounts of production workers, just people being tossed into jobs they’d never really done before,” the anonymous employee added. “It was horrendous.”
One former team member even revealed that due to the laid off employees not being official members of the Disney workforce at the time, they did not qualify for any bonuses related to Inside Out 2‘s potential (and ultimately eventual) success.
“To be told by our HR reps that we were not going to qualify for that bonus felt like an ultimate ‘f–k you’ from Disney,” said one of the laid off Pixar employees.
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Another insider revealed that the reason for Pixar’s supposed scramble regarding Inside Out 2‘s production was the fact that it was considered by many to be “a life or death situation” for the the studio’s future.
“That was the pressure felt by everybody,” an employee told Steadman. “‘We need this movie to succeed because we won’t have a studio.’ 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.'”
To this end, another insider then detailed how, in the hopes of boosting the film’s chances of success, the studio’s higher-ups had given the Inside Out 2 creative team numerous notes urging them to ensure that the aforementioned Riley came across as “less gay”.
In service of this goal, said the insider, the team was asked to remove any hint of “romantic chemistry” between the fledgling hockey pro and (presumably, given the context of the film itself) her fellow team member Val Ortitz, often in ways that required such outright changes as editing lighting in certain scenes and rewriting others completely.
“[We were] just doing a lot of extra work to make sure that no one would potentially see them as not straight,” said one former Pixar employee.
“Mind you, Riley is not canonically gay,” explained another. “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.”
Summarizing the thoughts of many Pixar team members regarding the matter, one insider admitted that “a lot of us accepted the fact that we may never see a major gay character in a Pixar movie.”
“I think the biggest feeling that I heard around the studio before the layoffs and now even post-layoffs, talking to people who are still there, is everybody feels like the executives are really just acting in a fear-based way,” explained another insider of not just Pixar’s apparent aversion to gay characters, but also its current lack of solid direction and vision.
“Everything is to preserve their own power in their own jobs,” they added. “So I think morale is really low because people no longer trust that they’re being led with their best interests at heart.”