‘Win or Lose’ TV Review: Pixar’s First Series Takes Some Bold Swings but Strikes Out with Trans Character Erasure [B]

You can’t discuss Pixar’s first original TV series, Win Or Lose, without bringing up what has been lost in the cutting room. Disney were hardly ever the progressive company they frequently made themselves out to be, but even after years of paltry queer representation, the announcement that they’d cut a subplot about a trans child out of the show ahead of release felt particularly cruel – the character Kai, voiced by 18-year-old trans actress Chanel Stewart, has been rendered canonically cisgender within the series thanks to the studio’s meddling. Early animatic storyboards leaked online soon after the news was made public, and the most surprising thing was that a studio whose first “openly LGBTQ character” was a one-eyed monster who briefly referenced her wife managed to sensitively, non-sensationally depict the everyday anxieties of teenage dysphoria. That it didn’t directly address this as a specifically transgender anxiety based on that footage, allowing it to be interpreted as general puberty anxiety, only makes Disney’s decision more cowardly; trans issues can’t even be inferred in their projects any more, let alone depicted unambiguously.

What remains of Kai’s story, the penultimate episode in the eight-part season, was not included with the screeners provided to critics. Based on the first four episodes, however, the biggest shame is that writer/directors Carrie Hobson and Michael Yates would clearly have done justice to a sensitive coming-of-age tale, with their series already showing the signs of being the most emotionally intuitive, inventively animated Pixar effort since Turning Red. It puts Win or Lose in a strange position, where enough of the show’s original intent shines through to applaud it, even if the series that will be released on Disney+ is a bastardized cut taken away from the creative team during production. Based on the early episodes, Hobson and Yates have made something good enough to feel complete in this iteration, even if later episodes will likely bear more obvious signs of being tampered with.

Each episode of Win Or Lose follows a different character linked to a junior softball team in the week leading up to their final game of the season. In the first four episodes, these comprise two different students with distinct parental troubles, a referee balancing professional duties with personal responsibilities, and a single-mother trying to provide for her child after being unfairly fired from her job. This character-centric, genre-hopping approach ensures it will be hit and miss based on the personal tastes of viewers, but for me, only one of the four instalments felt lacking, raising questions as to which dramatic perspectives are vital to be heard when a crucial one has been removed elsewhere. That episode is Blue, which follows referee Frank (Kiwi comedian Josh Thompson) as he struggles to reconcile his teaching and extra-curricular duties with his unhappy love life, still mourning a relationship he struggled to navigate. In a series which otherwise manages to find fresh new ways to tackle dilemmas faced by different generations, this is the one which falls most foul of genre cliches; if you want to stream a story about somebody joining a dating app to get over a harrowing end to a relationship, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is currently waiting for you on Peacock. It’s nearly two hours longer than this episode, but doesn’t drag anywhere near as much.

What is telling about Disney’s cancellation of a trans-centered episode, citing a need to not ruffle conservative feathers, is that the series frequently takes aim at right wing talking points. The first episode focuses on Laurie (Rosie Foss), the daughter of Coach Dan (Will Forte) who hasn’t once hit a single ball in all the years she’s been part of the team. Opening with the coach making an awkward speech in which he doesn’t want to single any one player out for praise, while preparing to award the team’s best player, appears to be setting up a cringeworthy takedown of what the right would deem “participation trophy culture” – instead, the writers try to find truth behind a tiresome comic trope, exploring how a young girl’s sense of self-worth has become inexorably tied to playing a sport she’s bad at just to spend time with her dad on the weekend. As with Turning Red, Win Or Lose adopts a hyper-stylised approach to conveying its tween character’s emotional states, anthropomorphising abstract prepubescent emotions and throwing them into frenetic scenes which gradually lose grip on grounded reality. It feels like we’re watching the restless minds of its young protagonist’s let loose, in a way that will make this more of an acquired taste even among the most die-hard Pixar fans. I found it refreshing to see them take bolder risks with their pre-established CGI sensibility; what a shame the whole series couldn’t make its way to screens similarly uncompromised.

Elsewhere, episodes three and four focus on mother-and-daughter Vanessa (Rosa Salazar) and Rochelle (Milan Ray), both struggling under financial hardships at home that the series doesn’t attempt to romanticize. Again, it’s the most a Pixar production has felt attuned to everyday concerns in quite some time, which hits on the genuine everyday concerns you wouldn’t hear from a series with Republican sympathies. If you can overlook the fact this series will never be seen in its complete form – which I understand is a pretty significant if – then there is much to praise here. I just hope Hobson and Yates are given more creative freedom next time around; they are telling the kinds of stories Pixar has been sorely lacking of late, and the studio urgently needs their voices on board.

Rating: B

The first two episodes of Win or Lose are now available on Disney+ in the U.S.

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Alistair Ryder

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