Nothing ever really stays the same for long. The world is always in flux. An award-winning animation studio, no matter how lauded it is, can’t stay the same forever. People quit, or get fired, or die, and get replaced by different people who aren’t as talented or competent. Eventually, bold visionaries are replaced by cold calculators more interested in money than movies.
A new report from the website IGN, based on the accounts of ten animators who were employed at Pixar on Inside Out 2, suggests the breezy creative mecca we saw in 2000s DVD bonus features, where everyone is happy and zipping around on scooters, no longer exists. Instead the Pixar of the 2020s is described as an anti-fun sweatshop hellhole where everyone is overworked and on the verge of a mental breakdown.
Witnesses claim the production of Inside Out 2 was the “most crunched film in Pixar’s history” with employees working seven days a week and given extra tasks they weren’t trained for. There was an immense pressure from the studio heads to perform well after several financial duds (some of which couldn’t be helped as they weren’t released theatrically at all), or the studio itself could be in danger.
Those who threw their backs out for the company were not rewarded. A massive round of layoffs hit Pixar shortly before the release of Inside Out 2. This meant that those laid off would not receive a share of the massive bonuses they would have been due for as employees after the film’s success. Said bonuses are crucial for their livelihood, as Pixar isn’t a union studio and, historically, has remained competitive by offering bonuses in lieu of union wages.
The most damning part of the report was the suggestion that part of the late revisions to Inside Out 2 were made to avoid any and all audience suspicion that Riley could be attracted to her teammate Val (judging by a quick glance of fanarts online, they did not succeed). Apparently someone in the C-Suite shares the same opinion as the basement-dwelling chuds of social media that Lightyear failed because of a sapphic lip-peck less than a second long and not because the movie itself was a confusing, joyless drag. The notion that this kind of bigotry “goes all the way up to Waternoose” is the most depressing thing I’ve read all year.
With all the setbacks and closures the animation industry has faced over the last few years, we don’t need the surviving places of employment to be like THIS. But there is something you can do about it: support The Animators Guild (TAG) as they re-enter negotiations with the AMPTP this week in Hollywood. It ain’t gonna get better without a fight.
