Did Pixar Make Riley 'Less Gay'?

The team behind animated hit Inside Out 2 were told to make main character Riley Andersen “less gay”, according to former Pixar employees.

Released in June, Inside Out 2 followed Riley, and the emotions inside her head, as she hits puberty and begins to grow up. Along the way, she meets Val, who many assumed would be her love interest.

But the studio made it very clear that the two were nothing more than friends. And, according to IGN, there was a reason why.

The report, which included interviews with 10 former Pixar employees who were all made redundant after working on the film, detailed “the pains of [those] layoffs, the pressure that surrounded [the film] and larger cultural concerns at the studio”.

Numerous sources told IGN that they were explicitly told to make Riley, who is 13 in the sequel to the 2015 smash, “less gay”.

The report went on to say “special care” was taken to make Riley and Val’s relationship “seem as platonic as possible… even requiring edits to the lighting and tone of certain scenes, to remove any trace of ‘romantic chemistry’.”

One source said it amounted to “doing a lot of extra work to make sure that no one would potentially see them as not straight.” Studio bosses were “uncomfortable” with the idea of queer themes in the film, and an insistence on not including them was a “big thing throughout”, it was claimed.

“Mind you, Riley is not canonically gay,” another source added. “Nothing about Riley says she is gay, but it is kind of inferred. That is something that they tried to play down at multiple points.”

Towards the end of the report, another source said: “A lot of us accepted the fact that we may never see a major gay character in a Pixar movie.”

Inside Out 2 is due to stream on Disney+ soon.

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