Pixar is back with an adorable new short. It just may not play well with kids.
On Monday, the Disney animation studio debuted its first short film under its independent spinoff program SparkShorts. The program is aimed at spinning fresh stories following a year of public controversies at Pixar, per Entertainment Weekly, and Purl definitely fits that bill.
Beyond the departure of Disney animation head John Lasseter amid sexual harassment allegations, Pixar also dealt with a firestorm after an ex-employee called out its "sexist boys club" in a blog post last June. That same topic is featured in Purl, which follows a feminine ball of yarn who's hired at the white-male-dominated B.R.O. Capital. Purl is at first ignored and scoffed at by her colleagues, but quite literally knits herself to fit their masculine mold.
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As writer and director Kristen Lester explains in a meet the filmmakers video, that's exactly what Lester experienced at her first animation job. "I was like the only woman in the room, and so in order to do the thing that I loved, I sort of became one of the guys," she says. Producer Gillian Libbert-Duncan says she dealt with the same thing. Eventually, working alongside women at Pixar helped Lester "realize how much of the female aspect of myself I had sort of buried and left behind," she adds. See what happens to Purl in a similar situation below. Kathryn Krawczyk
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