Pixar’s first TV series “Win or Lose” is pretty much a ‘win’ when it comes to them doing TV

Before that story, here’s what you should also know this week

• Disneyland’s 70th anniversary plans are being slowly but surely revealed, which include a tribute to the Sherman Brothers on Main Street U.S.A. and the first-ever Walt Disney Audio-Animatronic figure debuting as part of a new show on July 17, 2025, Disneyland’s official birthday.

• Marvel Studios is celebrating a good opening weekend box office for “Captain America: Brave New World,” even though the critical consensus of the movie has been largely negative.

Pixar does TV.

Pixar has spent all of its existence creating feature-length films, but like its fellow studios, it was given an order to create serialized content for Disney+ back in 2020. Nearly five years later, Enter “Win or Lose.”

Helmed by story artists-turned-showrunners Carrie Hobson and Michael Yates, and produced by David Lally, the series tells the story of a kids softball championship weekend- through different main characters points-of-view.

“Only in this type of format can you tell this type of story,” said Carrie Hobson, sharing that each episode delves into the same timeframe of action, but gives more depth into the characters who fill that time.

In the pilot episode, we meet Laurie, a 12-year old softball player who is having a hard time ‘getting in the game,’ while we also get introduced to the 20-minute runtime and narrative timeline that each episode will trace through, with different characters that slightly get introduced in the background of previous episodes.

If that doesn’t make sense, then you’re not alone. Even the crew who made it had to make sure they were making sense of their own show.

“It’s a lot of content. It’s like doing two feature films in terms of length, so writing and directing it all was a lot to manage,” said Yates. 

Adding Lally, “We’re so used to having our standard production pipeline for a 90-minute feature, but [“Win or Lose”] ended up being about 150-minutes total, just to put it all into perspective. But with all that extra time, we were excited to fill it with more characters that we could spend more time with that we typically couldn’t do with just one movie.”

With the change in the platform, there also had to be a change in the production process. Things are a bit different across every discipline that it takes to create an animated anything, especially at Pixar.

“It was a learning curve for the studio,” said Hobson. “We made the mistake of thinking every episode was its own movie with a beginning, middle, and an end for a character. The end [for each character] comes in the finale episode, so we had to re-train ourselves in story, production pipeline, and more,” she added.

Specifically for the new changes to the pipeline, Pixar was still able to use previous techniques and technologies to elevate the story. “For example, if it called for a character showing how big of an imagination they have, we used the learnings and tech for blending 3D and 2D animation to show that,” said Lally.

In the end though, the animation rarely becomes meaningful unless a good story weaves it all together. For the ensemble cast of characters that “Win or Lose” introduces over its eight-episode run, some techniques still required a Pixar-traditional approach.

“We wanted to fill our cast with real experiences from our own lives, but once you get going on the basics of a character, they will themselves begin to inform you on who they are and what they want to say,” said Hobson.

That sentiment and intent seemed to have been forgotten when word got out back in December 2024 that one character’s storyline revealed that they were transgender. Pixar leadership made the decision to remove the lines of dialogue that would infer gender identity, with Disney citing that they recognize that “many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline” when it comes to “animated content for a younger audience.”

Still, Pixar has released the first two episodes of the series as of this writing, and some social media and critics have hailed the series as fresh, original, fun, funny, and uniquely Pixar.

As for the future of the series, only time will tell if a second season of “Win or Lose” or a spinoff series like most successful TV shows end up becoming reality in the now-experienced TV studio that is Pixar Animation.

“We all love TV, and we were really excited to explore the medium as a studio,”said Yates. Added Lally, “And there’s definitely more story because there’s definitely more characters we can explore in the series already.”

Pixar’s “Win or Lose” will continue to debut new episodes once a week exclusively on Disney+, with a finale episode out on March 12, 2025. 

Our special thanks to Carrie Hobson, Michael Yates, and David Lally for contributing to this story!

STILL TO COME… more Disney!!

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