The Pixar Chapter

Just four days after receiving my master’s diploma, I found myself walking the sparkly halls of Pixar on the faraway planet of San Francisco, California — a city, state and studio I’d only ever witnessed on screen. Elated to gain access to the famed animation campus as one of two graphic design interns, our morning orientation felt like some otherworldly dream. But before I even had the chance to sit down in the fancy swivel chair in my new office, a seasoned employee waved a red flag about the kind of behavior (or misbehavior) I could expect in the studio.

“Oh, John’s gonna LOVE you,” he remarked about one of Pixar’s highest ranking executives, teasing and warning me at the same time. During the next few days, male and female employees alike told me that the company’s Creative Chief Officer, John Lasseter, could be touchy-feely with members of the opposite sex; that he had a tendency to make sexually charged comments to and about women; that interactions with him were often uncomfortable or even mortifying for female Pixarians. The women who endured this unwanted attention often had a less flippant take on it, but on a broader level there was a collective attitude of, “Oh, ha ha; that’s just our John.”

But John wasn’t the only prominent male personality in the company to have his own whisper network. I was likewise told to steer clear of a particularly chauvinistic male lead in my department.

“He goes on rants all the time about how he thinks American women are revolting, unattractive and sloppy in comparison to the beautiful creatures from his part of the world,” said one of the female artists who’d worked under the production designer (the chief artist who directs and manages all the visual aspects of a film). “But trust me, that won’t stop him from hitting on you.” Much like John, this man’s female targets had been reporting his vulgar, unprofessional behaviors for years, but his position and demeanor remained much the same. She instructed me to avoid him and do my best not to land a spot on his team.

Between the lines of my coworker’s warnings, she clued me in to several things about the Pixar culture that I found deeply disturbing: 1) this was a company that not only continued to employ but allowed known harassers to maintain positions of power; 2) such men felt emboldened enough to regularly express sexist, disrespectful thoughts about women in both private and public settings; 3) the burden of managing these kinds of lewd behaviors fell squarely on the shoulders of the company’s female employees, with little to no support from management.

To say I expected more from the men and women calling the shots at Pixar would be a gross understatement. I wasn’t fully aware of it at the time, but on a subconscious level it was devastating to learn — right from the start — that women were open targets for disrespect and abuse, even at a world-renowned workplace in the most liberal-leaning city in the country.

And the flood of reality-checking blows continued to roll in.

During week two of my internship, I was making tea in one of the company kitchens when the production designer I’d been warned about approached me to introduce himself. When I told him my name, he said, “I already know who you are,” with a sideways grin while he looked me up and down with predatory volition, insinuating that my reputation preceded me. When he said he recognized my surname and my look from his part of the world, the hair all over my body stood up on high alert. He told me he was excited to finally have a beautiful face from his motherland in the studio.

I smiled and nodded, said nice to meet you and scampered off down the hall so fast I burnt my hand with hot tea. Even though his intended compliment creeped me out, in some ways I felt relieved that I was “his type” and might dodge the insults and bullying that he was known to dish out to women he didn’t find attractive. When I turned the corner to my office I peeked back down the hall. Sure enough, he was still standing exactly where I’d left him, watching me walk away with wolf-like intensity.

Over the years, I white-knuckled my way through many unwelcome, objectifying interactions with him, with Lasseter and other men. A big part of me is disappointed in the ways I didn’t handle those encounters. There were opportunities there — for me to push back on men who were flexing and asserting their sexual dominance over me; to establish healthy boundaries and demand that they speak to me with respect and not treat me like a sex object; to ask my supervisors (or the HR department) to help me in holding them accountable for their loose tongues and poor behaviors, and to give the man in question a chance to course-correct. More importantly, I had opportunities to protect other women from being belittled and objectified like that in the future, but I didn’t take them.

My fierce desire to land and keep a coveted job with the one of the world’s most exclusive animation studios — and the fact that I’d been well trained in the not-so-admirable art form of stomaching and absorbing moments of sexual harassment throughout my lifetime — held me back from speaking out. I also recalled how my pleas for help had backfired on me when I reported harassment at my high-school restaurant job, so I decided to follow suit with many other female Pixarians, who would privately warn one another which men to avoid, but otherwise kept their discomfort to themselves.

Pushing back on or reporting this man would have been the more dignified and principled response, but I cannot say with confidence that either path would have been the most beneficial for my budding career in animation. During my five years there, I’d witnessed several women fall from grace after failed attempts to stand up to or question the behavior of a male lead. These women often had a hard time getting cast on subsequent projects after being branded “difficult” by leadership (a sentiment that was usually then echoed by her peers), and were later even laid off or demoted by the company.

Even though I had countless uncomfortable encounters with the chauvinist production designer, I wasn’t getting the worst of his behavior. As one of the fortunate female artists who was never assigned to his team, I wasn’t subjected to his crass and inappropriate nature on a daily basis. But a friend and former coworker of mine wasn’t so lucky. The ex-employee gave me permission to anonymously share her testimony about her experiences with the department lead:

“He knew from early interactions with me that I wasn’t going to play along with his antics. Instead he would make demeaning or sexist comments about women around me, even during meetings with the rest of the team. He would complain that what people thought of as his bad behavior was normal conduct in his ‘home country’ and that Americans were too sensitive. I would challenge him on these comments which only increased his anger towards me. I began to feel very uncomfortable around this individual because he would often try to antagonize me during meetings and give me dirty glares in the hallways. I asked to be moved onto a different project. I found out that he has a long history of bad behavior, and that many people refused to work with him. Most everyone on my team was a new hire, and I believe he was in charge of our team because we weren’t aware of his history and less likely to make a fuss. When he found out that I had reached out to complain about his behavior he would no longer speak to me and wouldn’t come to my office to review my work. When it came time for me to have a performance review, I was warned that the review from him was going to be negative. I asked that the other two production designers that I had worked with also review me, and I was told that they would not be asked. One of them told me that he had tried to talk on my behalf but that it wouldn’t be used as a formal performance review. When I had my official performance review, this production designer used it as an opportunity to unload his anger on me. He said that my behavior was disruptive, and that it had caused us to no longer be able to have group discussions because I wouldn’t talk to him with the authority he deserved. When I had my exit interview with the studio I told them about his inappropriate behavior. They told me that they were aware of the situation and that he would be talked to. A few months later he was promoted, and I have heard from other people that his bad behavior continues.”

It’s hard not to wonder if the friction my friend experienced with this man, and the negative performance review she received from him, may have played a role in the company’s decision to lay her off with a group of 190 other employees in 2012.

Cars 2 concept art. The female characters in this sequel are clearly tertiary while the boys club of buddy characters hog the limelight throughout the film, which echoes the imbalances between the sexes within the studio.

But my tactic of “going along with the program” wasn’t the most fruitful for my career path either. In 2010, shortly after I’d started working on my third feature film, my female art department manager approached me to relay some unsettling news.

“We’ve decided it’s best if you don’t attend art reviews on this production,” she announced, looking over the wall of my cubicle. “John has a hard time controlling himself around young pretty girls, so it will be better for everyone if we just keep you out of sight,” she said with a shoulder shrug, referring to our film’s director and the company’s CCO. Before I had a chance to respond, her floating head disappeared.

My face flushed red hot with shock, then disappointment, then rage. At the time, I’d never formally been introduced to the animation demigod. But true to his reputation, just about every time I passed the well-known director on campus — who was always being whisked from point A to B by an entourage of eager assistants, sidekicks and wranglers — he would look me up and down with the cheek-to-cheek grin of a Cheshire Cat and the jovial, carefree strut of a powerful man who knew he pretty much owned the place.

Reeling from the news that the I was being thrown out of our weekly art reviews because of the big boss’s lasciviousness, I wasn’t even sure who to direct my anger towards — knowing the problem was so much bigger than John. The legendary filmmaker presumably had no idea his entourage of yes-men were going around preemptively removing young women from his path, and I’m sure my manager wasn’t the primary brain behind this conflict-avoiding strategy. My gut told me that this exclusion tactic came from mid-level managers who were shielding John (and the company at large) from a potential lawsuit, and that it had little to do with protecting me. It was clear that the institution was working hard to protect Lasseter, at the expense of women like me.

I was crushed to have my participation in the filmmaking process — and quite possibly my career trajectory — thwarted simply because I was female. Missing weekly art review meetings meant I wouldn’t be able to pitch, articulate my ideas or discuss my work with the director one-on-one like everyone else on the team. It meant I wouldn’t be present for important conversation about his vision for the film, or to listen to the feedback and thoughts of a man who’s known around the world for his creative genius.

The fact that management would hold me back from that art room and deny me my hard-earned place at the table — rather than confronting the most important and high-ranking man in the company about the ways in which he regularly targeted and mortified the women in his presence––was deeply demoralizing to me. I was 26-years-old at the time and didn’t want to be branded as one of the “difficult” women who put up a fuss, so I blinked away the tears, took a deep breath and did what I knew how to do best: I put my head back down and kept working.

When the day of our next art review arrived I watched in stone silence as the big man himself walked past my cubicle with his entourage in tow, the rest of the art department already waiting inside for his arrival. As the door, which was just three feet in front of my desk, slammed shut behind them, it felt like a proverbial door was closing on my career.

But Lasseter didn’t need an intimate setting to make female employees uncomfortable. He gave out countless lecherous looks (or unwanted hugs and touches) to women he passed every day on campus. He was known for kissing on and groping women at studio events and wrap parties, even the wives and girlfriends of his subordinates.

The entire Pixar workforce witnessed the sleazy spin John brought to the studio’s annual Halloween bash. Quite a few of my female friends refused, year after year, to enter the costume contest — even if they’d worked for hours on a prize-worthy outfit — because of how infamously uncomfortable the costume parade became. If Lasseter found a woman attractive when she got on stage, he’d ask her to repeatedly spin around or bombarded her with suggestive comments, turning the event into yet another lewd spectacle. These very public displays were so cringeworthy and inappropriate (to not only the women who braved the stage but also to the general audience) that the company eventually asked a lead animator to take over as the master of ceremonies.

Lasseter’s open sexism set the tone from the top, emboldening others to act like frat boys in just about any campus setting. I’ll never forget the day a director compared his latest film to “a big-titted blond who was difficult to nail down” in front of the whole company, a joke that received gasps of disapproval.

Not surprisingly, tactless behavior towards women had a way of trickling all the way down through the ranks. About halfway through my time at the studio, I had a more intimate, disturbing physical encounter with a brazen male employee from outside my department. During an after-work celebration at one of Pixar’s employee-run bars, the coworker smacked and then grabbed my ass with a considerable amount of force while I was waiting for a volunteer bartender to make me a drink. Like a deer in headlights, I froze until my violator stumbled drunkenly away from me. The bar was loud, low-lit and filled shoulder-to-shoulder with intoxicated employees. I looked around, but no one seemed to have noticed what had just happened.

A few minutes after this encounter, I left the work party to head home, equal parts infuriated, shaken-up and perplexed. I replayed the moment in my mind over and over again. I had no doubt been caught completely off-guard, but I couldn’t wrap my head around my utter lack of response to such a deeply disturbing and violating interaction. Similar to the time that a complete stranger covertly stuck his hand under my skirt and grabbed my vagina in a packed San Francisco bar before slipping away into the crowd, a wave of strange heat had come over me immediately after his unwelcome hand made contact with my body.

I have since come to understand that this phenomenon is actually an automatic chemical response to physical aggression. Formally referred to as “tonic immobility” or “playing dead mode,” a sensation of paralysis occurs when the parasympathetic nervous system is triggered; a reaction that occurs in 7 out of 10 women who experience assault. According to studies reported on by LiveScience, this involuntary response literally puts a person’s muscles in a catatonic-like state during which they cannot move, may be unable to speak or become unresponsive.

At the time I wasn’t aware of the science behind all this, and felt confusion, shame and self-blame about not reacting to the incident in real time. Focused on what I thought were my own mistakes that night, I decided not to report the experience the following Monday. I don’t doubt that many similar incidents may have gone unreported in the studio for similar reasons.

LA Times reporter, David Ng, described the atmosphere at Pixar rather bluntly in a recent article about John and the studio he was pivotal in creating:

“Now [Pixar’s] former golden boy faces accusations that he presided over a rowdy fraternity environment where female employees found themselves looking from the outside in, unable to succeed or ascend the corporate hierarchy due to what some say is a systemic bias that extends beyond Lasseter… In interviews with The Times, nine former Pixar employees described an ingrained culture that makes it difficult for female employees to thrive, in addition to being a place where crude remarks about women and inappropriate touching occurred. They said the studio has perpetuated a system in which the company’s creative leaders, who are mainly men, are treated as royalty and are protected at all costs.”

I eventually found much-needed support and unity with other female coworkers. While I found it healing to bond with a fellowship of women who could understand and personally relate to the many hurdles I faced as a female minority in the studio, it was equally as disheartening to hear your own hardships echoed in the mouths of so many other ambitious, talented and capable women, even across generations.

I realized that others had also been inappropriately touched or demeaned by men in the company. Many of us knew how discouraging it felt to pour our hearts into every project that landed on our desks, but receive more praise and acknowledgment for our appearance or our fashion choices than our ideas and highly-skilled contributions.

Most of us knew what it was like to be excluded from lively conversations that would fall silent when we entered conference rooms or offices that were dominated by men. We’d worked for and alongside male leaders who would interrupt or talk over us, who wouldn’t acknowledge our presence in the room or repeatedly passed us over for projects and opportunities, while guys in our departments were often given more work than they could handle. We often made light of our similar experiences with men who got nervous — or just plain awkward — with us in a given workday, and sometimes laughed together about the lack of charisma and social skills that many of our “manolescent” counterparts in Hawaiian shirts and graphic tees had in common.

We each formed our own strategies for facing a system designed to protect male leads at all costs; men who often treated us like outsiders or objects. Determined to remain part of one of the world’s most visionary companies, many of us kept silent about these disheartening experiences, because we understood that the price for speaking out was high.

As I mentioned previously, those who did speak up were often let down by management, even when those managers were fellow women. One female friend had a particularly hard time getting support when a life threatening illness got in the way of her work duties. She had been hospitalized for months and was still dealing with serious health issues after returning to work, but when she attempted to communicate these challenges to her female manager, she felt dismissed and even threatened.

“You know that you’re replaceable, don’t you?” the manager said with a biting tone. My friend continued to have harsh interactions with this manager, who was known for dismissing and even bullying those who turned to her for help, especially when those subordinates were women.

Without the advocacy of her supervisor, tensions quickly rose between my friend and her two male department heads, who started to verbally accost her in her cubicle over their unmet expectations. One male art director continued to scold her even when she started to cry, then physically blocked the doorway so she couldn’t get out during the confrontation, she told me.

Feeling threatened and upset by this combative behavior, my friend scheduled a meeting with her lead department manager. Shortly after she sat down, it was clear that she wouldn’t be getting much support there either.

“What did you do to make him so angry?” the manager asked accusingly. “I was just yelled at this morning, this is how it works here — it’s normal,” she said, shaming her for not being more proficient at stomaching abuse. Even as my friend’s medical problems began to improve, things got continually worse for her at work:

“I was isolated in a remote office and my responsibilities were taken away from me. My attempts to find assignments were time and again turned down and I was cast aside without enough work to do. That daily occurrence of put-downs resulted in the feeling of being constantly rejected. You know your work environment is poisoned when you start throwing up the night before the start of your work week. After seeing two other female artists demoted and fired on that same show, I ended up being let go [from the studio] as well.”

Many female artists experienced long recurring periods of inactivity between film productions — what the studio calls “carrying cost” — that caused us to worry about our job security and dwindling professional skills. Women were not the only ones to go on carrying cost, but these dormant work periods certainly seemed more common for employees who used the restrooms marked by Bo-Peep instead of the Woody silhouette. This phenomenon had no obvious connection to merit — our busier male colleagues hadn’t distinguished themselves in any special way and yet somehow became favorites.

Despite the fact that I received uncommonly high raises and performance bonuses every year and was told I was articulate, fast and proficient at my job while on production, I was put on carrying-cost for literally the last year and a half that I was gainfully employed by the studio. During this period, I was expected to come into the studio during regular office hours, to reach out to support departments for potential side projects (like studio t-shirt designs and event posters), take or teach classes through Pixar University or devise other creative ways to kill time. But as a driven and passionate career woman, each month of passing dormancy felt like a cruel and unusual kind of torture for me. Riddled with guilt and anxiety about my job standing and future, I suffered from insomnia and spent most days submerged by feelings of depression and an overwhelming sense of purposelessness.

Long before my anxiety-inducing dry-spell had begun, I caught wind that Pixar was finally making a second film with a lead female character, and immediately knew I wanted to be a part of it. The imaginative new original, Inside Out, was about an 11-year-old tomboy who struggles with a move from the rural countryside to big city San Francisco. I was thrilled at the chance to work on a film that so closely resembled my own life story.