Shift in Power
If there was ever a time to radically change Disney from the inside, that time was now. With Lasseter out of the way, he was replaced at Disney Animation by Jennifer Lee and Pete Docter at Pixar. Lee was the writer and co-director of the smash-hit Frozen, and Docter had been a creative force at Pixar for years, directing Up, Inside Out, and Monsters, Inc. At the outset, the choices appeared solid. Still, in the case of Disney Animation, radical changes needed to be made in the racial and gender makeup of its leadership and creative process. This change began with Raya and the Last Dragon. It was October 2018, and Lasseter’s last Disney film, Raya and the Last Dragon, was still in the early stages of development and storyboarding. His fingerprints were all over this project. The initial directors were Paul Briggs and Dean Wellins, with Adele Lim (coming off her success with Crazy Rich Asians) as the sole writer. Unfortunately, this trio was seen as being “Lasseter people.” Briggs and Wellins needed to go as they didn’t fit the correct demographic (or maybe they were Lasseter loyalists) to tell Raya’s story properly. Rumor has it that Lee was gunning for Briggs and Wellins by foisting impossible tasks on them to either get them fired or, better yet, force them to quit. Being the veteran talent that they were, the traps didn’t work. Briggs was demoted to “co-director,” and Wellins was given a Disney+ series to direct. Disney did have a diversity problem within animation, prompting Jennifer Lee to recruit new talent from the outside. Lee brought in Carlos López Estrada to direct. The Mexican-American (not Southeast Asian) director was coming off his DGA nomination for his first feature, Blindspotting. Before that, Estrada was an experimental theater director who worked his way into directing music videos and commercials.
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