Last month, Disney confirmed what had previously only been anonymously alleged: It was censoring queer stories in animation.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Disney removed dialogue about a character’s trans identity from the upcoming Pixar series Win or Lose, making the character (voiced by trans actress Chanel Stewart) cisgender. A spokesperson explained the reasoning behind the removal: “When it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline.”
That decision came after Polygon revealed in November 2024 that Disney pulled an episode of Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur centered around a transgender character. It also followed earlier reports from IGN that numerous edits were made to Inside Out 2 to make Riley appear “less gay”—which included “edits to the lighting and tone of certain scenes to remove any trace of ‘romantic chemistry’”—and that Disney higher-ups blamed the failure of Pixar’s Lightyear on its same-sex kiss.
Current and former Pixar staffers fear this won’t be the last time the company shies away from films with a unique and powerful message. Some see the removal as purely political. Sarah Ligatich, a former Pixar assistant editor, told The Hollywood Reporter she recalled a meeting with former Disney CEO Bob Chapek in which it was indicated that “they see animation as a conservative medium.”
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In what might have been an unfortunate coincidence, the news of Disney’s censorship arrived in the same week as a very different benchmark for children’s animation. The 10th anniversary of The Legend of Korra’s series finale fell only two days later, on December 19. In the finale’s final scene, it confirmed that its two female leads, Avatar Korra (Janet Varney) and Asami Sato (Seychelle Gabriel), were entering a romantic relationship; that relationship was given the portmanteau “Korrasami” by fans.
This wasn’t the first time children’s films and TV shows have tried to include queer characters and subtext. (Remember when the English dub for Sailor Moon straight-washed Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune as cousins when the original Japanese version wrote them as lovers?). Children’s animation had—and still does, to an extent—operated more conservatively than its live-action counterpart. Whether it was official policy or something internalized, queer characters and moments were censored, often attributed to fear of homophobic backlash back home (which followed in Korra’s case) or censorship by countries that are downright hostile to LGBTQ+ people.
By 2025 standards, Korra’s queer representation may feel quaint. It relies on dropped hints, code, and subtext when—like its predecessor, the much-beloved Avatar: The Last Airbender—other ‘mature’ topics were pointed and assured. Those shows, which tackled everything from genocide and child abuse to complex political movements to PTSD, never spoke down to their young audience. The decision to hint at queer representation might’ve been called out for not committing had it aired now, but at the time, it felt seismic.
As Korra co-creator Bryan Konietzko noted in a 2014 Tumblr post confirming his and Michael Dante DiMartino’s intentions published days after the series finale aired, there “was a limit to how far we could go with it” (something that fans and critics surmised at the time). Acknowledging that it fell short of a slam dunk, Konietzko hoped it would be “a somewhat significant inching forward.”
To the extent that it could in 2014, Korra’s final scene practically shouted it from the rooftops. Clasping hands as if standing at an altar, Korra and Asami faced each other as they prepared to go on their next journey; the green and yellow light of the Spirit World enveloped them as Jeremy Zuckerman’s score swelled. It’s remarkably similar to how Avatar ended: From Avatar Aang and Katara’s embrace to the soft colors in the sky and that Zuckerman score, it offered a blueprint for Korra’s final scene.
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The main difference between those two finales? Aang and Katara kissed. Korra and Asami did not.
The reaction and impact were immediate for fans, and we’ve come a long way since then. Korrasami’s lasting legacy isn’t only in that scene, but in the path it paved for the shows and films that followed. While a TV show like Steven Universe was already pushing to depict clear and impactful LGBTQ+ representation on the screen, others could have cited the series to demonstrate both the positive reaction to its queer representation and how including it didn’t lead to the world ending.
In 2025, including LGBTQ+ characters in those stories seems to be a bridge too far for Disney. It’s now too much to acknowledge that transgender people exist in the worlds of Win or Lose and Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. It’s too much to leave the question of whether Inside Out 2’s Riley might have a crush on a girl open to interpretation. (For what it’s worth, whatever edits Disney and Pixar enacted to make Riley seem less gay when interacting with her hockey team captain did not work.) It’s too much to consider that perhaps Lightyear failed financially for reasons that had nothing to do with two women sharing a brief kiss, such as its convoluted premise and the fact that maybe most of Pixar’s audience wasn’t asking the questions Lightyear tried to answer. It doesn’t seem so far a leap to wonder if Korrasami’s subtext in the form of a hand clasp would now pass muster.
But in that intervening decade, some of the queer representation that appeared on the small screen and the silver screen served as little more than window dressing (Disney alone has an entire slideshow’s worth of “first gay characters”). But the most successful kinds of inclusion did it seamlessly. Because of those first steps, other shows were able to make their queer subtext into text and give us LGBTQ+ protagonists, such as The Mitchells vs. The Machines‘ Katie Mitchell and Strange World‘s Ethan Clade. Between Owl House‘s Luz Noceda and Amity Blight, The Dragon Prince’s Janai and Amaya, and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power’s Catra and Adora, we saw sapphic relationships form on the small screen. Two of 2023’s Best Animated Feature Oscar nominees featured potential trans allegories: Nimona and Across the Spider-Verse. Nimona also features a kiss between two male characters, a scene that establishes their kiss as a normal and unremarkable part of their life.
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For every victory, there have been setbacks. Rebecca Sugar and N.D. Stevenson had to fight tooth and nail to tell the central queer romances in their shows, Steven Universe and She-Ra. Nimona was transformative, but it almost didn’t happen after Disney acquired Fox and shut down the studio producing Nimona. Annapurna Pictures would save Nimona, which Netflix released in 2023; the same-sex kiss and other LGBTQ+ themes that Disney reportedly objected to remained in the film. Lightyear’s kiss only happened after a massive uproar from Pixar employees over censorship concerns made them reverse course, a move Disney still resented over a year later.
It may get even harder to have certain kinds of queer stories in animation as a new administration hostile toward LGBTQ+ people is about to be sworn in. There’s been an uptick in banning books featuring queer people, more attacks on trans rights, and a backlash against inclusive initiatives. Meta just got rid of restrictions on certain kinds of speech and now allows users to say that LGBTQ+ people have “mental illness.”
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Korra’s hand clasp meant a lot in 2014, but it might also be a visualization of where we might return. If studios are so scared of backlash or can’t depict queerness in animated works, vague subtext could be the only way to go. You can argue whether queer inclusion in those films and shows is meaningful or operates more as a way for studios to pat themselves on the back. But nothing gives viewers—especially young viewers—the message that they don’t belong and aren’t welcome like being erased from the narrative.
