The upcoming Disney Pixar film Onward will include the studio’s first queer character to have dialogue (though not its first queer character).
Onward revolves around two teenage elf brothers on a quest to magically reunite with their dead father. In one scene, the cyclops Police Officer Specter (voiced by actor Lena Waithe, herself a lesbian) pulls over a driver who complains about his girlfriend’s children. She comments, “My girlfriend’s daughter got me pulling my hair out.”
No big deal is made of the fact that she’s referring to a same-sex relationship. That’s as it should be. In this sense, it’s akin to the moment in Pixar’s 2019 Toy Story 4, where a classmate of the protagonist is dropped off at school by two moms, then picked up and hugged by them at the end of the day. They had no dialogue, but their relationship seemed pretty clear to me—and it was a queer enough moment for One Million Moms, a project of the hate group American Family Association, to call for a boycott of the movie. (I’m not linking to them; Google it if you wish.) (Some have also argued that Pixar’s Finding Dory also briefly showed a two-mom couple, but the filmmakers refused to confirm it, and lead voice actor Ellen Degeneres, who should know these things, denied it.)
I’d argue that the Onward depiction is more significant than the one in Toy Story 4, though, as the character, while still minor, actually has a line of dialogue about her same-sex relationship.
I have a longer piece coming out shortly on LGBTQ representation in children’s media, so I’ll save most of my commentary for that, aside from noting that this feels like a step in the right direction for Disney (which owns Pixar) after the disappointing “exclusively gay moment” in its 2017 live-action Beauty and the Beast. The depiction in Onward is still only a moment, though. When Disney makes a film starring a transgender prince or a princess with two moms, then I’ll know we’ve made real progress.
