Imagine how fun this trailer for Pixar's Win Or Lose could have been

Knowledge can be a cursed thing. Take the trailer released today for Win Or Lose, Pixar’s first TV series. It’s fun, funny, and visually inventive, telling the tale of a softball championship match told through multiple perspectives—as long as we don’t think too hard about the cuts Disney mandated for the project, excising the trans identity of one of its characters (Chanel Stewart’s Kai) from the show.

Clearly trafficking in the same territory as the studio’s Inside Out (and especially its recent sequel), Win Or Lose is about empathy pretty much by definition: Each episode will show the same events from a different perspective, with the trailer highlighting the fantastical way that different characters view the world. (The umpire, Frank, models himself after a fantasy character with a set of insecurity-deflecting armor, while one of the players has her anxiety manifest as an ever-growing sweat blob hanging off her back.) Like those earlier movies, the show is clearly mining both laughs and feelings out of the universality of various human experiences—a tactic which can’t help but ring hollow when we known Disney very deliberately cut one portion of that experience from the show because they were mad that parents/politicians might yell at them. We’re sure there are good stories being told here, and many of the visual flourishes look great. But man, what a bummer not to be in the universe where a fun show like this can just exist without this self-inflicted asterisk attached to it, where Disney had just trusted its creators to make something good without letting fear dictate cuts at what was reportedly a late stage in production.

Anyway: Win Or Lose! It debuts on February 19, 2025. Will Forte’s in it!