Pixar Insiders Tell IGN About Harsh Working Conditions on Inside Out 2
Pixar had a big hit this year – which may turn out to be the biggest movie of 2024 – and its reputation as the premier modern animation studio appears to be back, but some insider information suggests it’s still on shaky ground, and the workers are suffering most of all. IGN spoke to “several sources” about the making of this year’s blockbuster, Inside Out 2, and they learned about terrible working conditions, the financial destitution of animators who were laid off, and a mandate to ensure nobody thought Inside Out 2 was gay.
While Pixar is riding high from Inside Out 2, which is now the most successful animated movie ever made, IGN’s sources tell them the film was “the largest crunch in the studio’s history,” with workers forced into roles they weren’t prepared for to get the movie completed and animators working “seven days a week” for “a month or two.” Pixar understood that Inside Out 2 had to be a hit, that it was the movie that could save the studio and maybe even allow it to regain some of the prestige it had lost in recent years with a string of flops, so the film became “an all-hands-on-deck studio emergency” that almost everyone at Pixar worked on to some degree. (Apparently, this is reflected in the end credits of Inside Out 2, which are reportedly the longest in Pixar’s history.) This was partly due to the writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023, but it was also a new method Pixar has adopted called “Long and Lean,” which was supposed to give the studio a longer period to finish a movie with a smaller staff working on it. Instead, it forced “editors and artists” to make up for the longer development time the “creative leads” took.
But Inside Out 2 was a smash hit, right? That had to have meant a lot to the animators who worked on it. Well, to some of them, it did; others were fired when Pixar lost 14% of its workers in Disney-mandated layoffs. And while the layoffs had been announced in 2023, the way it happened was very dirty, with many assuming Disney waited until Inside Out 2 was completed before dismissing these employees to ensure they were around to help the film meet its release date. Even worse, Pixar employees were given a bonus when Inside Out 2 became successful – but those laid off were not eligible to receive it, probably a result of Pixar animators not having a union, resulting in most of them being “financially fucked right now.” That’s very scummy, and it feels like a total Disney move; IGN’s sources indicate that Disney is indeed the cause of many of these problems, with the Pixar bosses being mostly decent, well-meaning people. And it doesn’t appear to be stopping with Inside Out 2; the next big Pixar film, Elio, is still being animated, and IGN’s insiders tell them the working conditions are similar to those of Inside Out 2, with Disney predictably learning the wrong lessons from this year’s success.
On that score, here’s the funniest part. Remember the controversy over the gay kiss in Lightyear, the kinda-sorta spin-off of Toy Story featuring the “real” Buzz Lightyear? Well, Disney blamed that solely for Lightyear’s poor box office and mandated that Inside Out 2 be so non-woke that they got rid of benign elements just so nobody would take them the wrong way. They wanted Riley, the film’s main character, to appear “less gay” despite not being gay, with reports that they even wanted the lighting of certain scenes changed so there was no confusion about her sexuality. (I wonder what Disney thinks “gay lighting” is.) What’s great about this is that the bigger problem with this element of Lightyear wasn’t the kiss but Disney deciding to make this a big deal through their media sycophants, shaming people into watching it because it featured a gay kiss. Chris Evans, who voiced Buzz Lightyear in the film, even told Reuters he wanted anyone who didn’t like it to “die out like dinosaurs.” Gee, I wonder why nobody wanted to see Lightyear with their kids on Father’s Day weekend. Disney going nuts and making sure nobody thinks the Inside Out girl is gay is hilarious, like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer panics over Bart’s sexuality and does increasingly ridiculous things to ensure his ten-year-old son is on the straight and narrow. Much like when they minimized Finn on Chinese posters for The Force Awakens, this is another example of how phony Disney’s virtue signaling is.
It’s hard to say whether or not Pixar is “back.” They’ve had one hit, and while it’s a huge smash that made Disney a lot of money, it’ll take at least two more before anyone at the studio can breathe easy. But it sounds like it’s becoming a nightmare to work there, and this story reminds me of those special effects artists talking about the horrendous working conditions at Marvel. I don’t think it’s an accident that both of these studios are owned by Disney; they seem more and more like a despicable company as the days go by, and screwing Pixar workers out of the bonuses they earned after working themselves half to death is evil.
Let us know what you think of the working conditions for Pixar animators on Inside Out 2 in the comments!
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