WATCH: Disney/Pixar's Cringey New Short Embraces Feminist Workplace Tropes

Screenshot: Disney/Pixar

Nothing can escape the grasping hands of intersectional feminism, and you can bet that if you have a company that produces much-watched content, you’re going to get groped.

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Disney/Pixar has always been a company that churned out quality content that goes from hit movies to landmark classics in the blink of an eye, but it would seem that the famous computer animation company has now swallowed the woke pill and churned out a short that embraces all the feminist complaints about women in the workplace you’ve ever heard of.

The short is called “Purl,” and involves an enthusiastic pink ball of yarn entering her first day at the “B.R.O. Capital investment firm.” When she gets there, however, she finds a hostile work environment of nothing but male, white co-workers who want little to nothing to do with her.

She quickly finds that all of her attempts to find any camaraderie with her co-workers falls flat, and she’s interrupted at a meeting as if she’s not even there.

As all her bro-workers go off to lunch and leave her by herself in the office, Purl decides to change her look and attitude in order to fit in. She knits herself a suit and takes on a more flat, guy-like appearance. When her co-workers come back she starts to act and sound just like them, much to their delight, and suddenly she’s accepted.

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All is going well until another ball of yarn arrives who is just as cheery and ecstatic as Purl was when she first began and is quickly let down when she too finds herself being completely ignored. Realizing she was wrong to try to blend in instead of just being herself, Purl welcomes the other ball of yarn to go to lunch with her and the bro-workers, all of whom are less than pleased about it.

The film fast-forwards to later on, and B.R.O. Capital has transformed into a diverse workplace filled with balls of yarn and co-workers who now include black men among their staff too.

Purl is the first Disney/Pixar’s “SparkShorts,” which is a way for employees of the company to tell personal stories at the company. “Purl” is a short from writer and director Kristen Lester who says that her SparkShort is a telling of her first days as an animator working with all men.

She later talks about coming to work at Pixar with other women and realizing how much of her woman side she’d suppressed in order to fit in.

That women face their own brand of challenges in the workplace isn’t necessarily surprising, seeing as how every one of every size, shape, and color faces problems they have to overcome. Yes, even white men.

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The problem is that the short embraced some racist and sexist ideas in order to get its message across. The villains here were clearly white men, and only after Purl had carved out her own space at a company that is named to indicate it’s run purely by men engaged in a bro-culture that casts women aside do you see diversity take hold in the workplace.

It’s hard to take this kind of thing seriously from her short when she was hired and elevated through to ranks to be where she is now. What’s more, she’s making villains out of specific kinds of people in order to get a message across that becomes far less true by the day.

At the end of the day, Purl seems less like the fascinating and creative storytelling Pixar is known for, and more like a social justice propaganda piece that rides the animation company’s back.

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