Pixar Wanted Riley’s Character in ‘Inside Out 2’ to Appear ‘Less Gay’ — Report

Samantha Bergeson and Brian Welk
·3 min read
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Former Pixar staffers who worked on “Inside Out 2” claimed they received continuous notes to make the film’s main character, Riley, come across as “less gay,” according to a report in IGN about the film and animation studio.

Among 10 former Pixar employees who spoke to IGN, all whom remained anonymous, one said edits ramped up to “Inside Out 2” after the conclusion of the WGA strike last fall, with special attention given to removing any traces of “romantic chemistry” in the relationship between Riley and supporting character Val. The sources told IGN the edits involved “just doing a lot of extra work to make sure that no one would potentially see them as not straight.”

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“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,” one source told IGN. Another said leadership allgedly felt “uncomfortable” about queer themes in the film, and the thwarting of such was “a big thing throughout” development.

Disney declined to comment for the IGN report and declined to comment to IndieWire.

“Inside Out 2” made box office history as the highest-grossing animated film of all time by earning $1.6 billion globally. The film follows the conflicting emotions inside of Riley’s head as she navigates adolescence.

However, the IGN article attests that the supposed edits to “Inside Out 2” were a reaction to the box office flop of “Lightyear,” which included a same-sex kiss. Disney originally edited out the kiss for international markets after it was banned in Saudi Arabia, but restored it after public and internal uproar.

“It is, as far as I know, still a thing, where leadership, they’ll bring up ‘Lightyear’ specifically and say, ‘Oh, ‘Lightyear’ was a financial failure because it had a queer kiss in it,’” one source said. “That’s not the reason the movie failed.”

Pixar CEO Pete Docter in February 2023 said the animation company had to do “a lot of soul searching” after the film flopped and publicly said the reason for its failure was because it “asked too much of the audience,” giving them a science fiction film when people were expecting to see a Toy Story movie with Woody, Buzz, and Mr. Potato Head.

Another source in the IGN article pointed out that Riley is “not canonically gay” as Pixar released a short film in 2015 that showed Riley’s first date with a boy. But the film led many fans to read the film as queer coded, and some critics even felt “baited” by a sequence in the film in which Joy (Amy Poehler) comes face to face with what’s described as Riley’s “Deep Dark Secret” that many presumed to be a revelation that Riley was queer.

Docter, who directed the original “Inside Out” and was according to IGN allegedly an uncredited co-director on its sequel, recently publicly emphasized that Pixar should produce “universal stories.” A source told the publication that translated to “something that’s very homogenous that anyone can relate to.”

IGN elsewhere in the piece said some employees who were laid off before the film’s release were unable to receive a bonus for their work. Others described working conditions in completing the film as a “shitshow,” and making “Inside Out 2” a success after the disappointment of “Lightyear” became an “all-hands-on-deck studio emergency.”

“That was the pressure felt by everybody,” a 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. The whole time. Even now, I think people are gone, still feeling that pressure of like, ‘Oh my God, we did it. We did it.’“

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