Making ‘Inside Out 2’ Was A Nightmare for the Animators Who Were Promptly Laid Off for Their Efforts

You’d think Pixar would be throwing a big party to celebrate Inside Out 2, now the highest-grossing animated film of all time. But no one is in the mood to whoop it up inside the company, which laid off 14 percent of its workforce in May just ahead of the movie’s premiere. That means many people responsible for making Inside Out 2 are out of a job. 

Before the workers were let go, there was plenty of anxiety among the craftspeople making the movie. “I think for a month or two, the animators were working seven days a week,” a source told IGN. “Ridiculous amounts of production workers, just people being tossed into jobs they’d never really done before. It was horrendous.”

“The internal culture of Pixar right now is really rough,” a former employee said. “There is just an incredible amount of people who are like, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’”

But “can’t” wasn’t an option. After the failure of Pixar’s Lightyear, it desperately needed a hit. “That was the pressure felt by everybody. We need this movie to succeed because we won’t have a studio (otherwise),” said another employee. “And that is the pressure that everybody felt the whole time. The whole time.”

Some blamed Lightyear’s failure on that movie’s same-sex kiss, spooking executives about progressive storylines. “That’s not the reason the movie failed,” countered one source. 

But the theory still made Disney and Pixar executives overly sensitive about the implications, meaning extra care was taken with Inside Out 2’s Riley. Notes were passed down from on high to make the hockey-playing teen “less gay.” Storylines about friendship that were never intended to imply romance were edited to remove possibly amorous lighting or wayward glances — in other words, “a lot of extra work to make sure that no one would potentially see them as not straight.”

Those still at Pixar are worried that the company is renewing its last-second crunch strategies for its next film, Elio. None of that, of course, affects those who were let go as Inside Out 2 was nearing the finish line. “I would venture that at least 95 percent of the people that got laid off are financially fucked right now,” said one fired worker. 

To make matters worse? Pixar employees who worked on Inside Out 2 will get a big year-end bonus thanks to the movie’s success. But one condition of getting the extra cash is being a Pixar employee. The laid-off staff members did a lot of the work, but they won’t be reaping the reward. 

Pixar workers aren’t unionized, and their base pay is considered low. The incentive to work there is the lure of big bonus checks when the studio has a hit. And now after Pixar has released its biggest smash ever? “To be told by our HR reps that we were not going to qualify for that bonus,” said one former worker, “felt like an ultimate ‘fuck you’ from Disney.”