This article was written for the March ’25 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 348).

As far as awkward experiences go, it’s hard to top middle school. It’s a time filled with questions about who you are and what you want to do with your life. Win or Lose, Pixar’s first long-form original series from creators Carrie Hobson and Michael Yates, dives headfirst into these murky waters.

The long-anticipated show focuses on a co-ed middle school softball team named Pickles and the drama and happenings that occur in the lead-up to its important championship game. Each episode centers on a different player or parent, and the story unfolds through that character’s point of view.

“I think we came into it knowing we wanted to tell deeper, more mature kind of character stories, and making the overall characters and worlds a little bit more cartoony gives you this kind of freedom to go darker and deeper.”

— Co-creator Michael Yates

Hobson and Yates are both experienced animators, though they’re both first-time directors. Hobson worked on Lightyear, Luca and Elemental, among other projects. Yates was a storyboard artist on Cars 3 and Craig of the Creek. The pair met while they were working on Toy Story 4.

For them, the series’ middle school softball team serves as a metaphor for many of their feelings about work and life.

The Game of Life

“I think, very early on, that was the guiding light for Mike [Yates] and I,” says Hobson. “It was this idea that each character is struggling with something, or that they’re facing some sort of obstacle in their own personal life that feels like a loss, or, more specifically, feels like an unfair call. It seems as if they suffered an unfair judgement or a bad call in their life. It was about bouncing back from that feeling of defeat or low moment that becomes important for each character.

“That’s not just for the characters in this series,” she adds. “I find myself struggling with how you define when you’ve won, when you’ve become successful. You ask yourself what the peak accomplishment is. Sometimes, it never feels good enough, or you have a moment where a small setback can feel like a failure or a mistake made. I think the real points in life that define your character are about dealing with those moments where you make a mistake or something goes wrong, not how you deal with success.”

Once they decided that they wanted to explore the inner lives of their characters and look at their worries, anxieties and fears, the creators understood they would need to strike a balance between these serious themes and the look of the show.

“I think we came into it knowing we wanted to tell deeper, more mature kind of character stories, and making the overall characters and worlds a little bit more cartoony gives you this kind of freedom to go darker and deeper a lot of times,” says Yates. “If you go too realistic, sometimes it feels too on the nose with the look of things, and so it helped to be more like what you expect to see in a cartoon than something that looks like what you’d see in real life. In terms of the lighting, we also we looked at a lot of theater stuff at the beginning. It felt like it was a good example of how the world can sometimes feel for individuals, as though this is a character’s moment on stage and the audience is focused on them.”

He adds, “The world of each episode revolves around a certain character, and the whole show is kind of about stepping into a character’s life and getting into other people’s shoes so the audience can feel what they’re feeling and empathize with them. It was a fun way to really push the lighting, push the production design and center around that idea that the world is a stage for all these individual stories.”

It was recently revealed that a young trans character’s storyline was deleted from the show and won’t be televised. The Hollywood Reporter published an article explaining that a character named Kai, who was voiced by transgender actress Chanel Stewart, will not express her gender identity after all. The removal has produced widespread criticism and resulted in a petition to bring back Kai’s trans-identity storyline.

In response to questions about this move, Pixar told Animation Magazine that the deletion involved several lines of dialogue and that a Disney spokesperson has confirmed this change, stating, “When it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline.”

The show features a group of impressive actors in its cast. Will Forte (Saturday Night Live) voices Coach Dan, Rosa Salazar (Parenthood, American Horror Story: Murder House) is Vanessa and Milan Ray (The Wonder Years) stars as Rochelle.

The series was made almost entirely during the pandemic, with production starting in 2019 and finishing in 2023. Due to the pandemic, the creators weren’t able to do as many in-person test screenings as they would have liked, and they relied heavily on the voice talent to bring their experiences to the show.

“With the teenagers, especially, what we would try to do before every recording session [is] we would have lunch, and we would have all these questions that kind of lined up to tee off the pages as we were going to go through them,” says Yates. “We would get information from their lives about what they’re dealing with and ask them to tell us stories about situations they’ve been through. And then we would use that in the sessions to sometimes rewrite it, even in real time. We would follow what they told us about how teenagers speak, the language they use, and if they wouldn’t say something in the way that we’d written it, we would rewrite it so it would sound more authentic.”

Lived Experiences

Yates says that if the teens told them some lines didn’t sound right, the writers would find a way to say things that felt authentic. “If they told us a story about being bullied at school, we wanted to know how they would talk about it, how they would describe it, what they said to the person who bullied them and what the person who bullied them said,” he recalls. “It was immensely helpful for them to tell us what their experiences were and then bringing it into the stories that we told that way.”

Both Hobson and Yates loved collaborating with the voice talent as well as working with the crew on the show.

“I think it really shifts you as a person,” says Hobson of directing the series. “It’s constantly learning and relying upon others to build something with you. The best part of the job is when you get surprised by the outcome, because so much we very carefully orchestrate. As a director, I feel like the main job you’re doing is just making decisions. So, you’re basically getting all this great input of ideas to choose from, but you really must filter through it. You learn when to be decisive, and you get a sense of when to just say no to a way of doing something, versus being open-minded. And I hope that being decisive led us to make something that people will want to see.”

Pixar’s Win or Lose premieres on Disney+ on February 19.