Woke, broke, or boring? Pixar's crisis of 'identity'
The studio that used to do no wrong struggles to tell stories that resonate, particularly with a post-woke America
Happy 249th birthday America, and hope everyone enjoys a long holiday summer weekend — if you hear any noise, it’s just me and the boys boppin’. To get you on to your holiday festivities, we’ll keep this Thursday (!) edition of Family Matters relatively light.
Strange Things are Happenin’: Pixar’s struggles reflect overemphasis on identity
One Big Disappointment: It’s big. But is it beautiful?
It’s Me, Hi: Quartz, Christian Science Monitor, Reason
Parting Shots
Strange Things are Happenin’
The Walt Disney Company, and its subsidiary Pixar Animation Studios, have been the heartbeat of family-friendly entertainment for decades. The 1995-2010 heater Pixar went on has to be considered one of the most creatively (and commercially) successful runs of any production studio ever. Toy Story, A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, and Toy Story 3 — if you can’t find anything in there to awaken your inner child or emotionally transport you to infinity and beyond, you may not be human.
Sadly, the magic has long since died out. Nearly all of Pixar’s post-2010 slate have failed to reach the heights of their original offerings, with the notable exception of Incredibles 21 . I wouldn’t go so far as
, who writes the delightful and erudite cultural review , arguing that Pixar overextended itself into becoming “just another bomb factory.” But the data don’t lie.
That ultimate barometer of value, the box office tallies, show much more variability than in Pixar’s heyday, particularly with the studio’s original (non-sequel) offerings. Inside Out 2, Toy Story 4, and Finding Dory (as well as the aforementioned Incredibles 2, the (inflation-adjusted) best-performing Pixar film of all time) cover up the disappointing returns from Brave, The Good Dinosaur, and Coco. The Covid-19 pandemic complicates this story somewhat, but an alternate reality in which Soul or Elemental became chart-topping hits seems unlikely.
Over this same period, Disney has been in the crosshairs from conservative voices — most notably, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — for seeking to advance specific cultural messages, particularly around LGBT+ issues. The right hasn’t been imagining decreasingly-oblique references to same-sex attraction in Pixar releases: Onward had a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it lesbian police officer from another planet. Lightyear, a prequel (of sorts) to the Toy Story series, included a same-sex kiss. The 2020 short “Out” told the story of a gay man’s anxiety about coming out to his parents. Luca was the subject of accusations of “queerbaiting” from LGBT writers, with its protagonist’s coming-of-age journey seemingly influenced by stories of same-sex discovery (Call Me By Your Name may as well have filed a copyright claim.) Riley, the protagonist of Inside Out 2, has a will-they-or-won’t-they subplot that hints at a same-sex crush before an end-credit reveal that her “dark secret” was actually some light childhood vandalism.
These references were no accident; there was a concerted push from creatives within the company to use their cultural platform to push progressive inclusivity and social change.2 Most notably, in a 2022 video obtained by the Manhattan Institute’s
, Disney television executive Latoya Raveneau told her coworkers about the company’s quiet support of her “not-at-all secret gay agenda…I was just, wherever I could, adding queerness...no one would stop me, and no one was trying to stop me.” She wasn’t alone. Disney+, the company’s streaming service, posted in March 2022 that the service stood by the LGBTQIA+ community, and hoped to “reflect the world in which we live, and...be a source for inclusive, empowering, and authentic stories.”But as the company was increasingly open about its embrace of progressive values in its entertainment products, a broader cultural backlash (discussed in last week’s Family Matters) was gaining steam. Some on the right wanted to draw a direct link between Disney/Pixar’s embrace of LGBT tokenism and its struggles at the box office — “go woke, go broke,” as the phrase had it.
The actual relationship was never quite so straightforward. The pandemic, and broader shifts in the industry away from tentpole releases and towards streaming and short-form video, were always going to be difficult to navigate. But Pixar didn’t help itself by an increasing tendency to foreground identity-driven narrative at the expense of more universal themes. The wink-and-nod approach to gender politics were an indicator of the studios’ lean towards narrowcasting, rather than seeking to appeal to a broad swatch of families. The releases were increasingly too conceptual, too self-referential, and, yes, too woke. Pixar, in short, seemingly forgot how make movies for the general public, and started making movies for themselves and other animators.
And while the political valence wasn’t the whole story, it certainly played some role. IGN’s Alex Stedman reported that the company “internally put a large part of the blame for Lightyear’s financial failure on a same-sex kiss in the film,” leading to some of the suggestions of lesbian romance in Inside Out 2 to be toned down (to animators’ chagrin.) Shortly thereafter, a Pixar-produced TV series for Disney+ changed a central storyline so that a central character was no longer portrayed as transgender.3 At the time, a Disney spokesman said that the company realized that “many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline” — the mildest possible euphemism for an acknowledgment that the studio had misread the politics around transgender identity.
Now, Elio, the studio’s latest release, is the latest to pit animators’ preference for socially-conscious entertainment against studio execs’ desire to appeal to as wide a commercial audience as possible.
As a recent piece by Ryan Gajewski in the Hollywood Reporter recounts:
“Elio was initially portrayed as a queer-coded character, reflecting original director Adrian Molina’s identity as an openly gay filmmaker…Although viewers expressed how much they enjoyed the movie, they were also asked how many of them would see it in a theater, and not a single hand was raised, according to a source with knowledge of the event. This sounded alarm bells for studio brass…
“The changes to Elio were clear to one former Pixar artist who worked on the film and asked to remain anonymous: ‘It was pretty clear through the production of the first version of the film that [studio leaders] were constantly sanding down these moments in the film that alluded to Elio’s sexuality of being queer.’” (emphasis mine)
Elio has been a box office bomb, racking up Pixar’s worst launch in the studio’s history ($21 million domestic opening on a reported $150 million budget…yikes). Basing the main character around a controversial identity that then had to be rolled back left the company with a “schmaltzy yet sincere” and “sweetly conventional” film that is, by many reports, empty of meaningful narrative tension (no, I have not yet seen it.) Who knows, maybe an openly gay character would have made for an edgier, more compelling film aimed at a smaller audience — it would have certainly led to a more controversial one. But remember, the original cut led to a film that not a single member of test audiences was interested in seeing in theaters. Pixar had lost the plot long before any notes were passed down from the suits.
As the former and current CEO of Disney, Bob Iger, said last year: “The bottom line is that infusing messaging as sort of a number one priority in our films and TV shows is not what we’re up to. They need to be entertaining.” Some of this might be self-serving — The Bulwark’s
wrote, the “go woke, go broke” idea might be less an ironclad truism (after all, Inside Out 2 made a boatload) but an easy exit ramp for executives who noticed the company was getting too far over its skies, and needed to recenter its strategy of mass appeal:“If the reaction against Disney were really that visceral we’d have seen some impact on Disney+’s subscription numbers, and in North America, they’ve held pretty steady…Meanwhile, Disney’s “Experiences” division—that is, parks, cruises, etc.—saw revenues increase 13 percent in the most recent quarter. This isn’t a Bud Light situation…But it does give Iger and company an out, a dodge. Admitting that pushing animated movies directly to streaming and flooding the zone, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?-style, with mediocre Marvel and Star Wars shows for Disney+ were mistakes that tanked theatrical revenues would involve folks in the C-suite taking responsibility for badly messing up the whole brand’s content strategy.”
Likewise, the highly specific personal narratives that become Elemental or Turning Red might be creatively rewarding to produce, but don’t resonate commercially. And an animation studio whose products are designed to appeal to children had to learn the hard way that critical and commercial support from relatively small segments of the population don’t counterbalance the backlash from a broad array of parents looking for uncomplicated family-friendly entertainment they can enjoy with a seven-year-old. Going forward, the question for Pixar is whether the mentality Iger sketches out can re-permeate a company that — like many major corporations during the “Great Awokening” — saw its employee base as increasingly wrapping their professional work up into a broader mandate to advance social change.
There’s plenty of reason to root for Pixar to rediscover the magic. It is the only major animation studio that enlists U.S. animators, rather than outsourcing the work to cheaper international digital artists. The technological innovation and delight that powered their first films were truly groundbreaking, and some of the characters they’ve introduced are rightly considered classics (the less said about Cars 2, the better.)
But that will require the hard work of developing emotionally rewarding and resonant stories that appeal universally, rather than delving into hyper-specific stories of personal identity (like Turning Red) or frustrating both conservatives and LGBT activists with variously-“coded” characters. Inclusion and identity can make stories more specific; but they can also become a crutch, propelling a project through production in lieu of something with the wide resonance of, say, the original Toy Story or Monsters, Inc. films.
Movies take years to make, which means they tend to be a lagging indicator of where the cultural trends tend to be headed. Wokeness crescendoed up to 2020, which led to the increasingly overt LGBT representation in Pixar films then and in subsequent years. Now, America seems to be finding a new equilibrium around what kind of health care is best for youth suffering from gender dysphoria, how best to recognize the reality of sex differences in sports, and whether parents who want to raise their children according to their values around sex and gender should be approached with a strategy of support or social coercion.
Perhaps the commercial and creative catastrophe that Elio seems to be will solidify this trajectory. A successful Pixar will see a return of stories constructed from the ground-up that rely less on overtly “socially relevant” characters and messages (that said, its upcoming release, Hoppers, reportedly relies on a storyline faced on a girl who becomes a beaver to stop the construction of a real estate development — enough with the heavy-handed NIMBY propaganda!4) At the very least, I’d put even money on next year’s Toy Story 5 (sigh…decadence…) to rake in the box office dollars and to take pains to avoid anything that might be cast as “woke.”
One Big Disappointment
The House is poised to pass the “One, Big, Beautiful Bill,” and there’s a reason why this week’s Family Matters doffed a cultural criticism hat rather than a policy one — this behemoth may have certain provisions to recommend it, but on the whole it’s a win for the traditional, old-guard GOP agenda. And charts like this, from the Yale Budget Lab, speak for themselves:
Kudos to the bipartisan coalition that worked to strip the 10-year moratorium on state restrictions on artificial intelligence from the final bill. And whatever the opposite of kudos to the Democratic Senators who let pique stand in the way of an amendment that would have raised taxes on high earners to help fund a stabilization fund for rural hospitals who will be put at risk by Medicaid cuts (Senators Capito, Cassidy, Collins, Curtis, Fischer, Graham, Hawley, Husted, Hyde-Smith, Kennedy, King*, Marshall, McConnell, Moran, Moreno, Murkowski, Ossoff*, Sullivan, Warner*, Warnock*, Wicker, and Young deserve praise for taking the sensible path, particularly the asterisked names who crossed party lines to do so.)
To be clear, there are some victories included in this omnibus piece of legislation — among them bumping up the Child Tax Credit to $2,200 per child, a $1,700 scholarship tax credit empowering school choice, a one-year defund of Planned Parenthood, eliminating Grad PLUS and capping Parent PLUS student loans, border enforcement dollars, etc. But there were some whiffs along the way — the Senate scaled the CTC bump back from the House’s proposal of $2,500, defunded Planned Parenthood for one year instead of ten, and took out a provision aimed at preventing Medicaid from paying for so-called “gender transition” surgeries, all the while expanding (as NR’s
points out) tax cuts for seniors.With more time, maybe these hiccups could have been ironed out, but Congress had a self-imposed deadline to meet. And, like the Dude, the fundamental dynamics of this bill abide. The OBBB threatens to create a massive political vulnerability for the Members who voted for it, for the Vice-President who waived away criticism as “immaterial,” and for an administration that will now have to deal with $3 to 4 trillion in additional pressure on the federal deficit while defending against the headlines that will come from cutting social programs at the same time as cutting taxes for the well-off. But they had to pass something, and now, it seems, they have. Onward.
It’s Me, Hi
I spoke to Quartz about the Trump accounts that will give new parents $1,000 in a tax-advantaged saving account:
“If there was no political outcry when the Biden [Child Tax Credit] expired, there's gonna be zero political outcry when this expires…because it's gonna be 14 years before anybody even starts to see any benefit from it.”
I spoke to the Christian Science Monitor about what the One, Big, Beautiful Bill means for pro-family policy:
[We need to make] “it so that family is at the center of what we’re doing…in a way that doesn’t feel so isolating or individualistic…[This bill] is not my version of a pro-family agenda.”
In her piece on what progressives pushing universal child care get wrong,
cited polling conducted for my 2022 IFS report on parents’ views of family policy:“In 2022, the think tank Institute for Family Studies asked mothers of children under 18 what their "ideal situation" would be, in terms of time spent with kids vs. working. They found that 42 percent of mothers wanted to work full-time; 32 percent had an ideal of part-time work; and 22 percent would ideally choose no paid work at all.”
A piece I wrote on aging and the coming demographic crunch for Angelus News was awarded with an honorable mention from the Catholic Media Association in their annual awards.
Parting Shots
- reports on the shift in some states with abortion restrictions to clarify when abortions can and cannot be provided; and the opposition to such move from either side of the debate (Vox)
- writes a defense of literal helicopter parenting — trust me, it’s worth the click (Commonplace)
- writes on the tension between chasing AI supremacy against China and preserving humanity against biotechnological oligarchy (The New Atlantis)
Chuck Donovan gives some historical perspective on the “success sequence,” and why is it best thought of as a way of helping students flourish, rather than just to avoid statistical poverty (Washington Stand)
Business districts in big cities are still waiting for office workers to return, reports Zach Mortice — Can younger residents and families fill the gap? (Bloomberg)
- reports on how Christians are navigating dating in an app-powered mating market — for better and for worse (Christianity Today)
Praveena Somasundaram and
write on state efforts to “protect” (in some cases, expand) in vitro fertilization and other assisted reproduction technologies at the state level (Washington Post)- recaps the work of, among others, on how the long-term projections of birth rates are far too rosy (The Atlantic)
- traces how the left began to believe its own talking points around the perceived 'necessity' of gender transition for minors — despite the growing evidence to the contrary (The Atlantic)
Kansas has new laws, including establishing an Office of Early Childhood and allowing child support from conception, that took effect this month.
As part of a new budget deal, New York City will begin providing free child care for low-income families with kids age 2 and under (Gothamist)
For
, tries to take a measured assessment of the evidence around marriage and poverty.
Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.
Long before
wrote “The Anxious Generation,” Brad Bird wrote and directed a children’s animated movie that dared to interrogate the question of whether or not the Unabomber had a point!Elemental, though less tied to gender politics, had a heavy-handed immigration allegory at its core
Animators within the company were livid: “It’s just very frustrating that Disney has decided to spend money to not save lives” by elevating trans narratives, said one, suggesting a rather elevated mentality towards both the studio’s ability to influence youth self-conception as well as the evidence base around so-called “gender affirming care.”
Per the Hollywood Reporter, feedback to tone down political messages was not well-received by the creative team: “Unfortunately, when you have your whole film based around the importance of environmentalism, you can’t really walk back on that,” said one artist. “That team struggled a lot to figure out, ‘What do we even do with this note?'”
Pixar:
“What if XYZ had feelings!”
Starts with Toys. Ends with “what if feelings had feelings.”
Getting away from that they flounder.
Very interesting! It reminds me as a writer, esp for children - STORY FIRST!