To Galyn Susman and Angus MacLane, two of the members of the senior team behind the woke Pixar flop âLightyear,â let me put my feelings about your current employment situation â as well as that of 73 of your colleagues â in Disneyspeak:
âSo long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, adieu! / Adieu, adieu, to you and you and you!â
Yes, apparently when a company loses over a quarter of a billion dollars on two movies deliberately positioned as propaganda in the culture war, Gen. Mickey Mouse has to make some troop cutbacks.
Thus, 75 positions at the companyâs Pixar computer animation division, which was behind âLightyear,â were terminated in May, Reuters first reported Saturday.
While the firing of 75 people doesnât exactly seem like a big deal, it represents the first major job cuts at the studio in over a decade.
MacLane had co-written and directed âLightyearâ and had worked at Pixar since 1997. Susman is arguably the biggest departure; not only did she produce âLightyear,â but she also had been with the studio since its first movie, âToy Story,â was released in 1995.
Unfortunately, Susman did exactly the opposite of what Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom did in Mel Brooksâ âThe Producersâ: She took a surefire hit and turned it into a flop.
âLightyearâ was the easiest possible sell ever; it was supposed to be the movie that inspired Andy, the boy in the original âToy Story,â to want a Buzz Lightyear toy in the first place. It was a prequel to the most beloved and well-known franchise in the studioâs history.
It was, in effect, Pixarâs origin story. How do you screw that up?
Well, first, you get all worked up about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantisâ âDonât Say Gayâ bill â which didnât say âgayâ but instead merely prohibited instruction in sexual or gender identity for public school kids in third grade and under â and reinsert footage of a lesbian kiss that had little to do with the plotline into the movie to shove it conservativesâ faces.
You then send the voice actor behind the titular character in âLightyear,â Chris Evans, on a media tour in which he calls parents who objected to the LGBT agitprop âdinosaursâ and âidiots.â
Thatâll do, pig. (OK, not quite a Disney reference â but it fits.)
The film, unsurprisingly, had a disappointing opening weekend at the box office, which the media blamed on anything but that lesbian kiss.
Some said the reviews werenât as great as other Pixar movies. This didnât hold true because 1) critics still liked it, they just found it pleasant if slight, 2) the film that beat it at the box office, âJurassic World Dominion,â was already out for two weeks and had garnered reviews that made âIshtarâ and âDeuce Bigalow: Male Gigoloâ look like Oscar contenders, and 3) this is Pixar, a studio that made nearly half a billion dollars in box office off of a movie about anthropomorphic talking cars that got roughly the same kinds of reviews.
Some blamed it on people being used to streaming movies at home now, as if the wizards who set box office estimates hadnât factored that in.
Others blamed it on people not being able to figure out where âLightyearâ sat in the wider âToy Storyâ universe, absurdly entertaining the concept that a prequel is just too difficult for audiences to contemplate.
I reiterate: Pixar is the studio that made âCars,â a film about cars that are like humans, which raises all sorts of ontological questions you just donât want to ponder â but letâs face it, youâre going to anyway. (Is a tire change considered an amputation? Do they hold funerals at junkyards? Is being born a Yugo considered a birth defect?)
In any case, the bad returns from the first weekend continued apace, with âLightyearâ taking home $226.7 million in worldwide ticket sales versus $1.2 billion for âThe Incredibles 2,â another Pixar film with a similar budget, released in 2018.
Further evidence that this wasnât just the fault of streaming or reviews came when the Disney film âStrange Worldâ â an even woker beast, advertised as featuring the first queer teen character in a Disney picture â was an even bigger flop than âLightyearâ was.
In addition to Susman and MacLane, Pixarâs vice president of worldwide publicity Michael Agulnek, who had been in that job since 2015, was also laid off.
While the cuts were first reported Saturday, the layoffs were originally made May 23 as part of new Disney CEO Bob Igerâs plan to cut $5.5 billion in costs.
And again, while 75 Jobs at Pixar might not sound like a big deal, the animation studio has a workforce of only about 1,200, and two of those let go had major roles in the debacle that was âLightyear.â If I were someone involved in the creation of âStrange World,â letâs just say I wouldnât be buying any green bananas for the office lunchroom.
And itâs not just woke movie types getting the ax from Iger.
In April, Nate Silver â the left-leaning elections stat nerd best known as the impresario of FiveThirtyEight, now a property of Disney â announced his websiteâs staff would be on the chopping block, as well, and that he expected to leave the site heâs been most prominently identified with when his contract is up.
Celebrating layoffs is generally bad form, but we ought to acknowledge the reality here: Disney staked out an extreme, extremely visible position in the culture war â and then discovered, apparently to its shock and surprise, that Americans not only didnât rush to its side as reinforcements, they began actively organizing the counterattack.
Now, the mouse ears and Magic Kingdom logos are no longer just trademarks but warning labels to parents: Inculcation lies ahead. A lesbian kiss, the first queer Disney teen hero, a âfairy godmotherâ with a mustache â whatever. Itâs basically like a sign on an old-timey map saying, âHere be Wokeness.â Steer clear.
And as for those employees caught in the crossfire, even if they had nothing to do with the wokeness itself, ah well: You leave and heave a sigh and say goodbye â goodbye! Auf wiedersehen, everyone.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
