Well, that glass ceiling won’t break itself. Following severe backlash from Pixar employees over Disney CEO Bob Chapek's controversial comments over the “Don’t Say Gay” bill last week, it seems like the Mickey Mouse company decided to reconsider some past decisions that made the creative team at Pixar increasingly frustrated.
In an angry public letter signed by the LGBTQIA+ employees and their allies at Pixar, it was revealed by the team that every idea, arc, or scene in Pixar movies that featured “overt gay affection” was significantly watered down, modified or just flat-out cut from the story. The letter was penned after Chapek insinuated that the best way for big entertainment companies to fight discrimination was through the content they produce, a failed logic that was directly contradicted by said decisions made by the company regarding the stories that it tells.
Now, it seems like Disney is finally taking concrete steps into making LGBTQIA+ voices be heard. And the first order of business was to restore a same-sex kiss originally featured in Pixar’s upcoming blockbuster Lightyear. According to Variety, Lightyear features a female character who is reportedly in a meaningful relationship with another woman. The character, voiced by Uzo Aduba (In Treatment, Orange is the New Black) shared an onscreen kiss with her partner, and the scene, which had been scrapped, has now been recovered and will be featured in the final version of the movie.
Should this really be Disney’s final decision, Lightyear will make cinema history as the first animated feature film targeted to young audiences to show an explicit same-sex couple sharing a kiss. In previous Pixar titles, LGBTQIA+ characters were thrown in the background and their sexual orientations only vaguely suggested. In one of the studio’s recent titles, Luca, the story could be seen as a metaphor for coming out and accepting oneself as they are, but Pixar, well… never came out and said Luca was about that.
Disney’s disregard for LGBTQIA+ representation isn’t limited to Pixar. According to a Business Insider report, another project hurt by the company’s policy was Nimona, an animated film based on a webcomic originally created and published by ND Stevenson, a queer and transgender author. The story follows a shape-shifter who attempts to bring down a corrupt institution, and it was in active development at Blue Sky Studios, a division of Fox that created animated hits like Rio and the Ice Age franchise. When Disney bought Fox (and rebranded it "20th Century Studios"), Blue Sky was ultimately shut down and Nimona was terminated. What Disney obviously didn’t consider while making this decision was that they were yet again silencing LGBTQIA+ voices and preventing them to tell their own stories through a major platform.
Whether the decision regarding the Lightyear kiss is just damage control and won’t extend to further projects, only time will tell. But if Disney finally takes relevant steps towards LGBTQIA+ representation, this could be History in the making. Can we get a #BringNimonaBack up?