Read this: The working conditions on Inside Out 2 were reportedly a "shitshow"
According to some Pixar employees, Disney panicked after the pandemic and Lightyear's same sex kiss
Screenshot: Pixar/YouTube
We want to believe that Pixar, the industry standard for ambitious creativity and childlike wonder, has a positive workplace culture. Instead, a new report from IGN indicates it’s the industry standard for animation (derogatory). In other words, serious grind, for little money, until everyone starts losing their minds. And like every major studio, Pixar execs have been “acting in a fear-based way” since the pandemic and strikes, as one source put it, “So I think morale is really low because people no longer trust that they’re being led with their best interests at heart.”
Pixar was in a bit of a slump before Inside Out 2 became the highest-grossing animated film of all time. The Pixar employees interviewed described the atmosphere of Inside Out 2‘s production as “a life or death situation” and “an all-hands-on-deck studio emergency.” Though a Pixar representative told IGN that the workload was normal, these insiders describe the crunch as “unprecedented.” Here are just a few of the things the sources said about working on Inside Out 2 and its follow-up, Elio:
“I think for a month or two, the 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.”
“The internal culture of Pixar right now is really rough. There is just an incredible amount of people who are like, ‘I can’t do this anymore.'”
“It was rushed work, paranoid work, paranoid leadership, mixed messaging …You’re just working 24/7. And so after a while, your body just starts breaking down.”
“It was a shitshow.”
Notably, these employees observed that Pixar leadership really believes Lightyear failed because of the same-sex kiss in the movie, which led to a lot of hand-wringing about making Riley seem “less gay” in Inside Out 2, reportedly even “requiring edits to the lighting and tone of certain scenes to remove any trace of ‘romantic chemistry,'” according to the outlet. 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.”
Then, after all that, many of the employees who worked seven days a week for multiple months on Inside Out 2 were laid off. Ex-employees describe the heartache of being shut out of Pixar before even getting to see the project across the finish line; worse, they lost not only their modest salaries but also the bonus pay that was promised should Inside Out 2 become a success. (Spoiler alert: It did!) “To be told by our HR reps that we were not going to qualify for that bonus felt like an ultimate ‘fuck you’ from Disney,” one ex-employee said. Another is quoted as saying, “I would venture that at least 95% of the people that got laid off are financially fucked right now.” You can read the full, messy report here.