Hawaiian-Shirt Tyrant

[tealin]

Can John Lasseter Ever Return to Disney?

It takes a lot of guts to speak up about this, when you're on the inside, even with a guarantee of anonymity,* so all my respect to those who did so for this article. It's more or less a follow-up to last autumn's exposé about sexual harassment, but looking at wider organisational patterns and Lasseter's behaviour generally, not just with women.

In 2014 I bookmarked this supposedly light-hearted op-ed by David Mitchell, because it spoke so strongly to my experience at Disney, and the implications of the broad appeal of the song "Let it Go". Since then it's become a bit prescient politically, but in light of the above, I bring it up again: The Idiot's Guide to Being a Fun-Loving Modern Fascist. Lasseter's Disney (and, for all I know, Pixar) was a personality cult, not a fascist state, but it's no more fun to live in Stalin's Russia than Mussolini's Italy – apples and oranges, maybe, but it's all fruit in the end.

*There was an LA Times journalist taking stories for an in-depth article following the exposé, but so few women were willing to speak, even anonymously, that it never got off the ground. The thing about fostering a culture of fear is that it works.