Pixar’s Inside Out 2 became a massive box office hit, earning the title of the biggest animated movie of all time. However, several former Pixar employees claimed that they had to push through a toxic and disorganized work environment just to finish the film.
They also claimed that Disney asked Pixar to rewrite the script to make Riley (the teenage protagonist) seem “less gay.”
Inside Out 2 follows Riley’s story, portraying her emotions—sadness, joy, fear, and anxiety—as characters with different goals. The film emphasizes the importance of mental health.
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IGN spoke to 10 former Pixar employees about the dark secret behind working on Inside Out 2. According to the sources, the company pushed employees to their limits and laid off staff despite the movie’s success.
“I think for a month or two, the animators were working seven days a week,” one source said. “Ridiculous amounts of production workers, just people being tossed into jobs they’d never really done before… It was horrendous.”
One source describes the experience as “the largest crunch in the studio’s history.”
Pixar executives believed Inside Out 2 would recover the profits lost during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the interview. That’s why the studio pushed employees working on the animated film to the brink.
“That was the pressure felt by everybody,” one source said. “We need this movie to succeed because we won’t have a studio [otherwise]. And that is the pressure that everybody felt the whole time.
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Former employees also claimed that Disney felt ‘uncomfortable’ with the film’s ‘queer themes.’ Thus, the film required numerous edits to make sure Riley and Val (a supporting character introduced in the sequel) seem as platonic as possible.
to the point that they even had to edit the film’s lighting and tone in certain scenes to remove any “romantic chemistry.”
One source described the process as “just doing a lot of extra work to make sure that no one would potentially see them as not straight.”
“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.”
As of writing, Disney or Pixar has not released any statement addressing the claims.
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