“What Sort of Dreams Should We Be Making?”: Pixar Creative Culture and the Crisis of Disney+
Ben Rogerson / Texas Tech University
By late 2020, one year after launch, the streaming platform Disney+ had exceeded five-year forecasts to amass an astonishing 87 million subscribers. With Disney dubbed a “streaming colossus in the making,” and with an all-time high stock price to show for it, CEO Bob Chapek announced that high-profile subsidiaries like LucasFilm, Marvel Entertainment, and Pixar would ramp up production of direct-to-streaming content. But “the streaming honeymoon” ended in April 2022. “Seemingly overnight,” investors started prizing profits over subscribers. Seven months later, the Disney board ousted Chapek — skyrocketing programming costs had contributed to $1.5 billion in third-quarter streaming losses, more than double the previous quarter. Chapek’s predecessor Bob Iger returned to the CEO position with a plan to achieve “streaming profitability” by cutting $5.5 billion in costs and downsizing 7,000 Disney employees.
In May 2024, cuts reached Pixar, which fired 175 employees, or 14 percent of its workforce. Studio president Jim Morris pitched the measure as a course correction: Pixar could “return to [its] focus on feature films.” In theory, this pivot allowed Pixar to renew its commitment to what co-founder Ed Catmull termed “sustainable creative culture.” Pixar had succeeded by striking the right balance between creative and commercial demands, between nurturing the “Baby […] so pure and unsullied, so full of potential” and “feeding the [hungry] Beast.” With Chapek gone and Iger cutting costs, Pixar was done overfeeding the Beast.
I found no evidence of Pixar employees specifically denigrating Chapek’s streaming push. Nevertheless, Iger’s strategic about-face was likely met with relief, at least if anonymous complaints about Disney’s decision to premiere the Pixar films Soul and Luca on Disney+ are any indication. “These movies are crafted for the big screen,” complained one employee. “We don’t want to be a title just on Disney Plus,” said another. Admittedly, pandemic-era circumstances primarily drove the Disney decision. But these employees also balked because they saw a crisis in the making: the prestige of the theatrical platform had secured the integrity of Pixar corporate culture and the value of Pixar labor. The Disney+ move further intensified this crisis by not making the Pixar features into in-app purchases. Unlike Mulan and Raya and the Last Dragon, two Disney features that also went direct to streaming, “Luca doesn’t even have a premium price next to it.” “Does [that] make it lesser?”
In the streaming era, creative workers appealing to market criterion is not a scandal. This concern for assigning Pixar films a price is, from these workers’ perspective, the counterintuitive sign that they are not, in fact, cutthroat hacks churning out undifferentiated product. The significance of a price is also why few employees took solace from the fact that Chapek-era Disney “was over the moon about the [streaming] numbers” for Soul. As a recent essay about Netflix notes, “no moviegoer enters a theater expecting to leave after two minutes,” and so the box office has become “the most distilled and straightforward measurement of audience interest.” To buy a movie ticket — or make an in-app purchase — commits the consumer to watching a film with a higher quality of attention, just as Pixar animators want them to. “We want you to watch these movies with no distractions, no looking at your phones.” Of course, the money is important too — it gives Pixar license to continue focusing on “what matters”: “the piece of art.”
In what follows, I argue that Chapek-era Pixar sought to revise what constitutes sustainable creative culture — what counts, we might say, as the piece of art — to assure employees that the streaming pivot neither decreases the value of their labor nor undercuts their prospects for professional achievement. More specifically, I examine Dream Productions — one of two long form direct-to-streaming Pixar series — as an artifact of how company culture tried to internalize what turned out to be a strategic dead-end. Set in the world of the Inside Out franchise, Dream does not focus on the personified emotions headquartered in Riley’s mind, but the teams of “mind workers” who make her nightly dreams at the titular studio Dream Productions. To reflect on the Disney+ pivot, the four-episode animated series thus narrates the challenges of making dreams for a smartphone-addled tween.
Dream adopts multiple strategies to contend that streaming ultimately improves rather than degrades Pixar culture. In its most basic sense, the Inside Out conceit facilitates an allegory about direct-to-consumer production. The film camera — what the crew calls “the Riley camera” — is a direct interface linking product and consumer. Demand for content is also constant: “Riley dreams every night.” Within that overall conceit, Dream presents a surrogate for pre-streaming Pixar culture in Farewell My Paci, a “hit dream” with a three-year-old Riley that recalls Toy Story by anthropomorphizing the playthings in a child’s life (Figure 2). This long-ago dream is also noteworthy for how it so thoroughly captures the toddler’s attention. “That dream changed the world” by convincing Riley to do what the personified emotions could not: to spit out her pacifier (Figure 3). At the studio, such groundbreaking achievements in dream-making do not go unmarked. For as long as Riley remembers it, the dream persists as a “Slumber Award,” a cherished keepsake for any director lucky enough to make a hit.
When Dream flashes forward nine years from toddler to tween, it confronts the challenge of a new pacifier, one that no tween can give up: the smartphone and, more to the point, what it betokens for consumer attention in a streaming era. Here the series maps an economy of attention that maintains the dream conceit and builds on Pixar workers’ concerns. Run-of-the-mill streaming and/or television fare — what the series insists that it is not — loses Riley’s attention by putting her to sleep (Figure 4). As for dreams, the best ones keep her attention by keeping her asleep. Whereas “clockbuster[s]” are dreams so engrossing that Riley sleeps through her alarm clock, productions that follow the same old workflows to recycle the same old toddler dreams result in abrupt wake-ups. What are needed are “better dreams, ones that speak to where [Riley’s] at right now.”
What makes for better dreams? The series gives its answer when a dream goes dangerously awry. To save Riley, the protagonist and beleaguered director Paula Persimmon makes her aware that she is dreaming. The resulting “lucid dream” compromises on what constitutes consumer attention and professional achievement in the streaming era. Once it is over, Riley will not “remember that dream,” Paula realizes, but “sometimes [dreams] just need to be felt” within the nonstop ambience, one might say, of streaming. But take solace that professional culture still remembers. “I’ll never forget it,” concludes Paula.
Notably, these supposedly better dreams also require mind workers to abandon existing production protocols. During the lucid dream, Paula delegates authority to Xeni, an assistant director whose preference for handheld cameras and natural lighting marks him a champion of more flexible, less expensive workflows. True to form, he calls for the cast and crew to enter “full improv mode.” What the mind workers are enacting is the production history of the series itself. To feed the beast, to achieve “feature quality for a fraction of the price,” the Dream creative team likewise gave up the “old ways,” as the series VFX supervisor put it, to “create a new workflow.” When Riley wakes up, ending the lucid dream, Dream would confer legitimacy on this new workflow by re-staging the famous studio logo (Figure 5). Rather than shining its light outward toward viewers, as Luxo Jr. does, a spotlight beams down on Paula and the Riley camera (Figure 6). During the brief Disney+ pivot, Dream suggests, Pixar culture survives by conflating Catmull’s baby with the beast. The series is “making something great,” it contends, by “making the process better, easier, and cheaper.”
Image Credits:
- Dream Productions (2024) (author’s screen grab)
- Anthropomorphic objects in Farewell My Paci recall to the Toy Story franchise (author’s screen grab)
- The toddler Riley spits out her pacifier after dreaming Farewell My Paci (author’s screen grab)
- Smartphone content puts a tween Riley to sleep (author’s screen grab)
- Luxo Jr. shines outward at the end of the Pixar logo animation (author’s screen grab)
- Dream re-stages the Pixar logo to spotlight process, not product (author’s screen grab)