We work in a world of imagination.
As humans, we're always projecting ourselves onto any characters that we see.
We may see Lightning McQueen as a car,
but we're still interpreting that as Owen Wilson as a white male.
It's always really striking to me that we can imagine talking cars,
but we can't imagine female NASCAR racers.
It feels like we should be able to do this.
We should be able to do this.
But representation in the movie industry has been an ongoing fight.
The world of animation is no different.
According to a report by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative,
only 17% of 120 recent animated films
featured female characters as the lead or co-lead, and only 39% of 100 recent
animated TV series featured a largely female cast.
Disney touts itself as a progressive and diverse company.
Studies from their 2021 fiscal year show their ongoing strive
for diversity in the workplace.
But this specific problem is less about the people behind the screen
and more so about the characters and speaking lines in animation.
My goal is to kind of normalize seeing diversity on screen.
Being able to present that on a large scale is incredible.
This is Jessica Heidt, the department manager
of feature films at Pixar, before managing the art department.
Her work in discoveries at Pixar changed the way in which scripts were digested.
Several years ago.
I started a program or a process of tracking gender
across our characters and sort of trying to work with
increasing screen representation and diversity on screen.
I got started in theater.
I worked at a theater
called the Magic Theater in San Francisco because we were a smaller theater,
we were able to be a lot more diverse in our choices.
I know personally as a director, I was absolutely drawn to those stories.
My transition to Pixar actually came directly from theater
because Mary Coleman, who had been the associate artistic
director at the Magic Theater, had transitioned over to Pixar.
She would bring me in to do script coverage,
which was basically reading scripts and writing analysis.
The continuous reading, writing and analyzing
surprised Jessica, after she noticed one major commonality.
I first noticed that there was a discrepancy
between the male and female characters when I was working on Cars 3.
What I was sort of feeling was that, "Oh,
this feels very uneven", and so I went in and actually counted the difference.
And at that point, it was 90% male and only 10% female.
It was so stark it became something that I think I was unable
to step away from and say, "You know, this isn't a problem".
I had gone back and tracked the data across all of our films.
At that point where we were was about 75% male
for speaking characters and for the line count.
Take a look at Pixar's earlier movies
and one of their most popular franchises, Toy Story.
With the exception of Andy's mom, sister, and Bo Peep, virtually
all of the characters and speaking lines are predominantly male.
When I finally was able to present this to the executives,
I did it with a collection of charts and graphs.
Because for me, being able to take the emotion
out of what we were doing and to just be able
to have them look at the numbers and it was irrefutable.
I remember being absolutely terrified in that meeting of just, you know,
handing them out and wondering what people were going to say as this room
of of all of the top execs were were in there looking at it.
Not only were the executives open to hearing about Jessica's discoveries,
but they immediately
put a plan in action working together to come up with the solution. As a studio.
We have the gift really, of working with these incredible technical minds
as well as these storytellers.
And so every time you come up
with an idea of like, "Oh, here's something I would like to change".
A technical wizard will come in and say, "Oh, I can create a tool
for that to make it really easy and really scalable".
I had some incredible allies, the biggest
and most amazing one being Josh Miner, who is in our tools department.
He was thinking about it from a technical
point of view of like, "Is there something that we can be doing
as an organization that might be able to address these problems?"
And it was really Josh that said "Hey, we can use this tool that we already have
in Pixar that we use as script supervisors to track data".
Now this is something that the executives, the producers, the directors, anyone
on any of the creatives on any of our movies are now expecting
this information and it becomes part of the conversation at every brain trust.
In 2019, Pixar created SparkShorts, a series of short animated films
designed to give women and people of color more opportunities in animation.
There was really a space where the cultural moment outside of me
outside of Pixar really shifted, and I feel like the momentum of
that was really something that helped ricochet the work
that we're doing into the sort of level that we're able to do right now.
Black Lives Matter and #MeToo were those cultural moments
that catapulted a shift towards producing more diverse and inclusive movies.
Pixar films like Coco and Soul showed the level of success when diversity
and representation are showcased, and look at the cast of Toy Story 4.
Fast forward through the franchise, and we see the introduction
and inclusion of characters like Mrs.
Potato Head, Jesse, Dolly and characters like
Bo Peep were given more meaningful roles in the main narrative.
In animation, it takes so long to make our films,
so we are finally starting to see the receipts
of the work that got started in 2016.
You know, in 2017, when we really, as a studio, started paying close attention.
As you see the next films
coming out, you're going to be seeing a lot more diversity on the screen.
I also think that we're starting to see more women, more people of color,
more more people in the creative spaces that are creating.
And I think that naturally leads to more diverse representation on screen.
I know it's not always the big jumps that we that we want,
but I feel like it's starting.