From the first trailers for Inside Out 2, everyone had the same question: Is Riley gay?

Beyond the stereotype of being a hockey player, the teenage Pixar protagonist looked like she was crushing on new character Val. Fans quickly picked up on undertones of queerness, generating buzz for the movie across the gay internet.

But when Inside Out 2 hit theaters this June, there was no queerness to be found. It wasn’t a shocker, considering Pixar’s (and Disney’s) track record on LGBTQ+ representation. But a new investigation by IGN reveals there was more to the story: that Pixar reportedly blames attempts at queer representation for some of its past shortcomings, and that Inside Out 2 was intentionally made straighter.

IGN got the inside scoop from 10 anonymous former Pixar employees. According to them, the studio attributes the failure of 2022’s Lightyear — an infamous box office flop — to a same-gender kiss that lasted less than a single second. 

“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.”

But the former employees say that the studio’s leadership isn’t convinced. Instead, they’re following chief creative officer Pete Docter’s insistence on telling “universal stories” — meaning, by one source’s account, “something that’s very homogenous that anyone can relate to.”

When it came to Inside Out 2, that meant getting note after note to make Riley come across as “less gay,” said multiple sources.

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What does that mean in practice? Changing the lighting, tone, and overall editing of scenes between Riley and Val, to leave no doubt that their relationship is purely platonic. In other words, “just doing a lot of extra work to make sure that no one would potentially see them as not straight,” one source said.

“Mind you, Riley is not canonically gay,” added another. “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.” 

Naturally, the internet didn’t take this news kindly. Not only were gays being blamed for the studio’s own shortcomings (namely, Lightyear not offering much beyond nostalgia bait), but it was limiting the potential for queer representation in animation in the future. Hopefully, now that the cat’s out of the bag, Pixar will consider bringing actual LGBTQ+ rep to an upcoming film — whether it’s Riley in Inside Out 3 or otherwise. 

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