As Pixar Faces A Possible End, Disney Adds Lightyear To The Romance Section of Their “Pride Collection”

The critics have been proven right by Disney. What was once called a minor scene is now promoted as a defining category.

We’re now more than a year removed from the controversy surrounding Disney Pixar’s Lightyear, a children’s film that became a token of the civil war between the Walt Disney Company’s pride advocates, the state of Florida, then-CEO Bob Chapek, and former Disney executive Kareem Daniels. For many, Lightyear became the quantifiable point-of-no-return at which the company that Walt built shed its veneer of traditional American values and became “woke.”

While some online commentators and journalists have speculated that Disney is trying to pull back on orientation-based integration, today’s Pride Month collection would indicate otherwise. On this June 1^st, Disney+ has added a new Pride Collection to celebrate their failing streaming service. The collection contains no new content, but Disney has organized the list in a way to clearly communicate how Disney views their content internally.

Disney has publicly denied that they are pushing an agenda, with Bob Iger stating on earnings calls that they are just taking a moral stance akin to the civil rights movement but leaks of internal meetings have referred to a “not-so-secret gay agenda.” Today they seem to have admitted that Lightyear is  gay movie, in fact, Disney+ classifies Lightyear as one of their “LGBTQ+ Love Stories.”

There are other revelations to be made from the collection, of course, like the neat and tidy episode listing that shows which singular episodes of shows Disney considers to promote Pride. Many of the episodes are from children’s shows and some of them are specifically aimed at preschoolers. If someone were looking to find Pride content to do a series of videos exposing this kind of content at Disney+, this would be very helpful to them.

There are some shows that heavily feature Pride-based content that are mysteriously missing from the list. Willow, if it were still on the service would most likely be in the collection. Howard, (which was rumored to be removed until Disney acquiesced) now has a prominent place in the “LGBTQ+ Talent” collection. Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur was somehow left out despite having numerous characters that have non-standard pronouns featured in splash cards when they are introduced. Disney Junior’s Spidey and His Amazing Friends show for pre-schoolers doesn’t make the list despite having a character that presents as a male in heavy makeup, voiced by female voice actor with a gender-neutral name, and is referred to using they/them pronouns by the Incredible Hulk.

While rumors about Lightyear’s potential removal from Disney+ began to swirl over the last few days, these rumors have so far appeared to be incorrect, perhaps mistaking the fact that Lightyear is not available in the Kids Only section of as a complete removal of the box office flop from the service. So far, no theatrically released content has been removed from the service.

Of course, Lightyear’s history with the company makes it more significant than such a poorly received film should be.

The short version of the story is that in the wake of Disney’s silence on the state of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill, Bob Chapek was pressured to allow Pixar to reinsert a same-sex kiss that had been previously removed from the then-upcoming Toy Story spinoff. Information leaked to the Hollywood trades saying that Disney corporate had pushed back for years on the desires of Walt Disney Company creatives who wanted to include more same-sex romances in Disney feature films. In this case, it also leaked that Disney corporate (and therefore Chapek) objected only on the kiss, but not on the rest of the content of the film.

In response to critics of the film, a social media strawman was constructed that stated that audiences were outraged by a brief kiss between two women. While there is some grain of truth to that argument, the film itself is rather lackluster based on reviews and box office performance. In my examination of the film, I noticed a de-prioritization and demoralization of the formerly heroic Buzz Lightyear, the film’s only white character (SPOILER ALERT: who is also the film’s villain).

As I’ve written about before, the film spends more time building up an idealized paragon in the form of the black lesbian military hero Alicia Hawthorne, who is described by the fallen Buzz Lightyear as “the greatest Space Ranger in the history of the corp.” The film ends with the main characters paying homage to a statue of Alicia Hawthorne, but not until after Buzz Lightyear helps Alicia Hawthorne’s daughter defeat an alternate timeline toxic masculine version of Buzz Lightyear that just wants to “matter again.”

Pixar, which is currently under the creative control of Pete Docter, had also come under some scrutiny for casting calls that were looking for an authentically trans underage performer to provide a voice in a yet unnamed Pixar project. Docter, who became the creative leader at Pixar after John Lasseter was terminated by Bob Iger, directed many critically acclaimed and commercially successful films while under the creative oversight of Lasseter. Pixar has thus far struggled to achieve that same success as box office returns dwindle.

Under Bob Chapek, many Pixar releases of varying quality were quickly sent to Disney+ after a theatrical release (if not straight to Disney+), a move that rankled Pixar employees who had worked so hard to see their films on the big screen. COVID was used as the reasoning behind many of these shifts, but as that specter of the global pandemic faded into the distance, Disney corporate no longer had a public reason to send Pixar films straight to Disney+ other than a lack of faith in the critical and commercial quality of the films.

The strategy of choosing a release platform according to the financial viability of the content was spear-headed by former Disney executive Kareem Daniels. The first official move by Bob Iger when he was reinstated as CEO was to fire Kareem Daniels, by some accounts at 6:00 am the Monday morning of his return. At the time, Kareem Daniels was arguably the most powerful black executive in Hollywood.

As Pixar gets ready to release their new film Elemental, business analysts have been speculating if this might be the final test for the studio. With the exit of so many Pixar luminaries like Ed Catmull, John Lasseter and Brad Bird, and with Pixar films failing to be profitable for the Walt Disney Company, the case for Disney maintaining two separate animation studios is weaker by the day.

Box office projections for Elemental would indicate a lack of interest in the film, perhaps culminating in a nine-figure loss for the Walt Disney Company. Elemental is directed by Peter Sohn, who helmed a previous Pixar misstep with The Good Dinosaur. If Elemental fails to be a hit at the box office, it begs the question if the “house poor” Disney might weigh the option of selling off Pixar or simply consolidating it into an “in-name-only” brand that Walt Disney Animation Studios uses as a nostalgia token to trick consumers into remembering better times when Bob Iger trusted talented and challenging filmmakers to run his company.

For now, viewers can judge for themselves the quality of Pixar by viewing the Pride Collection on Disney+.