WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Onward, now playing in theaters.
Disney has been slow to embrace LGBT representation in its movies but sure wants credit for any minute signs of progress. It's become something of a joke that every big Disney movie is hyped up as some sort of "first" for the company's LGBT representation, and each example ends up being underwhelming. There were two seconds of Lefou dancing with a man in the live-action Beauty and the Beast, ambiguous background extras in Finding Dory and Toy Story 4, an unnamed man in a therapy group in Avengers: Endgame and a kiss between tertiary characters in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
Onward, the latest Disney-released film to be hyped for an LGBT "first," fares slightly better than past examples. Officer Spencer, a cyclops cop voiced by lesbian actress Lena Waithe, passes some bare minimum expectations for "representation:" she's a character with an actual name and some degree of impact on the story, and her queerness is unambiguous -- she clearly mentions having a girlfriend.
However, Officer Spencer still only appears in a single scene and has little more than a dozen lines, give or take. There's so little to the appearance that the "girlfriend" line is already being censored in Russia. While it's nice Pixar included this moment, it's still not at the level of representation offered by Laika's ParaNorman eight years ago, in which its gay character, Mitch, was a major part of the adventure. It's certainly nowhere near the LGBT representation that's become increasingly prominent among TV cartoons like Steven Universe, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power or even Disney's own Star Vs. The Forces of Evil.
The news Pixar's "first" queer character would appear only in one scene did not sit well with many queer people online. Some of the negative responses were overblown or uninformed. There were some angry the character was a cop, never mind that Onward as a movie is surprisingly pro-civil disobedience. Then there were the complaints the character's design was "ugly," which is a totally subjective opinion unrelated to the quality of representation.
Ignoring these silly side issues, however, the basic argument that queer viewers deserve more and Disney does not deserve cookies for doing a bare minimum is a serious and valid one. It's been eight years since ParaNorman broke ground for family animation, and five years since same-sex marriage became the law in the United States. Surely the LGBT community can and should demand more than easily censored token acknowledgement.
The thing with Onward is that, aside from widowed single mother Laurel Lightfoot's clear interest in men given she's dating the centaur Colt Bronco, sexuality and romance are so beside the focus of the movie Pixar could have casually made one of the main characters gay or bi. You could easily imagine an alternate version of Onward where Ian Lightfoot's intense anxiety is demonstrated in his being afraid to ask a boy on a date, or one where Corey the Manticore tries to flirt with Laurel and gets rebuffed. Such an alternate version might actually warrant giving Disney cookies.
Perhaps someday a Disney film will actually earn those hypothetical gay cookies. We're not expecting it to be Jungle Cruise; while the theme park-based film is said to feature a significant gay character played by Jack Whitehall, said character has been notably absent from the film's marketing thus far and it's unclear what that appearance will look like on the big-screen. We're a bit more optimistic about Marvel's Eternals, where Phastos is said to kiss his husband, and Thor: Love and Thunder, where Valkyrie might find her queen. But any optimism about LGBT representation in Disney films is of the cautious sort.
The LGBT community has fair reason to be cynical about representation in Disney movies when the best the company's done thus far for explicit cinematic representation is a character who appears in only one scene. Hopefully this will change and Disney can rake in the dough with whatever the queer equivalent of Black Panther is, while understanding the frustration this didn't happen years ago.
Written and directed by Dan Scanlon, Pixar's Onward stars Chris Pratt, Tom Holland, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Octavia Spencer. The film is in theaters now.