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Former Pixar staff working on Inside Out 2 have criticized the company over alleged “horrendous” working conditions they experienced while working on the film.
The sequel to 2015’s Oscar-winning Inside Out was released earlier this year in June, becoming the highest-grossing animated film of all time.
But despite pulling in $1.6billion at the box office, Pixar laid off 14% of its workforce – around 175 employees – in the following months, with affected staff now speaking out against the company.
A report from IGN has broken down the allegations of ten former Pixar employees who claimed they suffered exhaustingly long hours, poor leadership practices, and physical exhaustion after the intense schedule required to get Inside Out 2 ready for release.
Why are Pixar’s ex-employees criticizing the company’s culture?
The Inside Out films are famous for their messages of the importance of mental wellbeing, including the need to welcome all emotions and the power of working through overwhelming feelings of anxiety or stress.
But many of the staff who worked on the film who have since been laid off said the working conditions at Pixar did not live up to this message.
According to one former employee, Pixar was under huge pressure to deliver Inside Out 2 in time for release. They described it to IGN as the “largest crunch in the studio’s history,” with a second source stating it was “an all-hands-on-deck studio emergency.”
Another source says this had a damaging impact on demands placed on employees, alleging they were working long hours for months on end.
“I think for a month or two, the animators were working seven days a week,” they claimed. “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 further source said, adding that this may be prompting other employees to leave the company. “There is just an incredible amount of people who are like, ‘I can't do this anymore.’”
Other former employees claimed to IGN that the reported seven-days-a-week work schedule was further complicated by bad leadership, poor communication, inefficient management structures, and a lack of trust, damaging the company’s culture. “It was rushed work, paranoid work, paranoid leadership, mixed messaging,” one source told IGN.
The same individual even claimed that the emotional and psychological toll impacted their physical health. “You're just working 24/7. And so after a while, your body just starts breaking down.”
Pixar’s benefits & wellbeing support are not enough to outweigh “unsustainable” situation
Disney declined the opportunity to comment on the IGN report, but some sources did speak positively about Pixar. Employees were reportedly paid for overtime and offered extra time off to compensate for their long hours.
“They do take care of us when we do have aches and pains,” one source revealed. “They throw everything at us to try to help. There's really great health benefits, mental health. So it's not like they're not trying and they're not offering things.”
But the same source clarified that even with these benefits and some team leaders who recognize the importance of employee wellbeing, the demands placed on staff due to the intense production pressure was still too much.
“At the end of the day, I feel like the expectations and that ‘let's just crunch and get it done,’ but then it goes on for months and months, it’s not sustainable,” they said.
Layoffs at Pixar trigger “weeping and crying”
Some staff reported the pressure from Pixar’s leadership made the work feel like “a life or death situation” for the studio.
“That was the pressure felt by everybody,” one individual explained. “We need this movie to succeed because we won't have a studio [otherwise]. And that is the pressure that everybody felt the whole time. The whole time. Even now, I think people are gone, still feeling that pressure of like, ‘Oh my God, we did it. We did it.”
Pete Docter, Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer has previously spoken publicly about this pressure. “If this [film] doesn't do well at the theater, I think it just means we're going to have to think even more radically about how we run our business,” he told TIME in an interview days before the film’s release.
Although many employees recognize the quality of Docter’s work, some criticized the scope of the central role he has at Pixar and how it impacts processes and schedules. “You cannot do anything without Pete. Literally nothing,” one former employee reported. “And that creates a bottleneck.”
Despite the box-office success of Inside Out 2, some employees were not safe from job cuts in the months after the film’s release. The news came as a further blow to the affected staff who were devastated to lose their roles after the intense work they put in to make the film a success.
“The day that the layoffs happened was like a funeral,” one source recalled. “There was weeping and crying in the atrium. There are images from that day that are going to stay with me for quite a long time.”
Pixar's HR team under fire
Another former employee noted how unfair it was that those who bore the brunt of the work to make sure the film met schedule did not see any of the financial rewards. Those who were laid off lost out on a bonus paid to staff following Inside Out 2’s success.
“To be told by our HR reps that we were not going to qualify for that bonus felt like an ultimate ‘f*ck you’ from Disney,” one former employee stated, with one source adding that staff work “all year” for the bonus. “That is what partially makes working at Pixar worth it… we depend on that.”
Another suggested that "at least 95% of the people that got laid off are financially f*cked right now.”
The sources also criticized Pixar’s HR team for their handling of the layoffs. According to IGN’s report, employees were locked out of the company’s network, had their key card access restricted, and were told not to visit the office to pick up their belongings during core hours to avoid making employees feel uncomfortable.
“There was no one from HR or anything supporting us or guiding us,” an affected employee said. “It was all mixed messaging, and that was super frustrating and emotional and just adding to the whole stress of all of it.”
