Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | March 9, 2026
The Wall Street Journal profiled Pete Docter last week, the current head of Pixar and director of Up and Inside Out. It’s a piece that paints a portrait of a major Hollywood studio in a period of intense flux, and of the reluctant boss drafted in to steer the ship. Docter has served as the chief creative officer of Pixar since 2018, replacing John Lasseter after he was accused of workplace misconduct.
Reading the piece, you get the sense that Docter would rather just be making movies and not dictating changes to everyone else’s. Being the micromanager who has to answer to the big boss over at Disney (and all the shareholders) means he has to double down on sequels and retreads. “As time’s gone on, I realized my job is to make sure the films appeal to everybody,” he’s quoted as saying, which is so depressing given that Pixar was once defined as the place where animation outsiders could buck the system. But the quote that made most people throw up their arms was Docter’s line about Elio.
The 2025 movie was a big financial flop as well as one of Pixar’s most poorly reviewed movies. After test audiences were lukewarm on Elio, it underwent extensive retooling that led to the sacking of its director, Adrian Molina. It turns out that, among the other cuts, LGBTQ+ themes were removed. The lead character was supposed to be gay but that was entirely exorcised from the project.
Why? Because Docter says they didn’t want to broach topics that parents might not be ready to discuss with their kids. Or, to be specific, “We’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy.”
Well, screw you too, Pete.
Look, I get it. He’s not the only one making decisions like this and Disney, like everyone else in Hollywood, has abandoned all pretences of inclusivity and diversity in favour of pandering to Trump. I imagine Bob Iger wasn’t exactly banging down his door to beg him to reconsider cutting queer details from Elio. But hundreds of millions of dollars in therapy? From a cartoon kid who’s gay? That’s some hard-right ideological nonsense right there. Oh, queer people are so scary that their mere presence requires months of psychological explanation for poor innocent kids? Isn’t this the exact crap we hear from anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups? It’s one of the most insidious lines in the big book of homophobic attacks: to declare that your existence is a threat to kids. This is particularly nasty because Adrian Molina, the director he sacked, is gay.
Pixar used to be lauded for its emotional intelligence and refusal to dumb down hefty emotional themes for kids. Pete Docter is the guy who gave us the first five minutes of Up and one of the best explanations of how your brain works in Inside Out. Hearing him parrot the same anti-woke rhetoric that’s poisoned Hollywood — and throwing a gay man under the bus to do so — is bleak. Moreover, it shows that he thinks his audiences are stupid, which was never something you would have thought about Pixar once upon a time. Now, it’s just another corporate sequel machine.
