Many of Disney’s attempts to spin television shows out of its marquee theatrical brands have been hampered by a refusal to think in TV terms – it’s hard to watch the indistinct, truncated episodes of something like Obi-Wan Kenobi or Hawkeye without thinking of the better movies that could’ve told these stories. In some ways, Pixar’s Win or Lose could be accused of a similar waffling between television and film. The animation studio’s first original TV series (that is, not a series of streaming shorts starring pre-established characters) follows a week leading up to a middle-school softball championship from multiple perspectives, both child and adult, each episode dedicated to a single character. As such, its episodes are distinct from one another, but also quite short – sometimes under 20 minutes when you subtract the protracted credits – and often lacking even temporary resolution. Presumably this is all building to an extended big-game finale, but with only five of eight episodes provided for advance review, it’s hard to say whether it will wind up feeling more like a clever use of its chosen medium, or simply a Rashomon-style feature film sliced neatly into pieces.
But what’s great about Win or Lose, setting it apart from other high-profile Disney+ shows, is that the episodes are too entertaining for this question to matter. After the intermittently inspired retread of Inside Out 2, here is a Pixar project more in tune with the original Inside Out, as well as 2022’s Turning Red: a show that’s attentive to the lives of tweenage kids and their various caregivers, and expresses its characters’ feelings with the stylized freedom of great animation.
Win or Lose’s episodes repeatedly start from firm emotional grounding before using animation to bring its characters’ conflicts to more whimsical life. The first episode introduces the Pickles, the co-ed softball team coached by Dan (Will Forte), and then turns to the struggles of Dan’s daughter Laurie (Rosie Foss), who is not naturally athletic but wants desperately to prove herself on the field as a way of asserting her worth. (Clearly her parents’ divorce and its attendant wounds remain fresh.) Her anxiety manifests as a cutely gross blob called Sweaty (Jo Firestone) who sits on her back, growing bigger and weightier with every moment of self-doubt – but doesn’t come to literal life in the reality of the show. Other characters can’t see Sweaty; as with other metaphors in the series – an suit of armor on a secretly sensitive teacher and umpire; a shapeshifting girlboss persona for a stressed-out overachiever – it’s a flight of fancy that’s not “real” but not precisely depicted as fantasy, either. The show simply doesn’t belabor its transitions between subjective and objective experience, and in doing so, Pixar finds a beautifully fluid approach to the old saw of seeing scenes repeatedly play out from multiple perspectives.
Some of these running metaphors can feel a little too orderly, like the attempts to chart, categorize, and bureaucratize the roiling emotions of the Inside Out movies. But as with those films, especially the first one, there’s also a teachable utility for the show’s all-ages audience. Without getting preachy – in fact, often while being hilarious – Win or Lose visualizes how both children and adults process their emotional challenges, and how those dimensions are often initially hidden from casual view. It’s especially sad, then, that one feeling – fear – prompted Disney to cut a storyline for the transgender character Kai (Chanel Stewart), a middle-schooler only glimpsed in the first five episodes (and now implicitly retconned into being a straight, cisgender character). The given rationale was that “many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline,” a watery truism that somehow wasn’t applied to the show’s treatment of similarly delicate real-life topics like divorce, economic struggle, social ostracism, or lost love. Were “many parents” eager for a family show with an entire episode about an adult man navigating dating apps?
In a perverse way, knowledge of the interference faced by Win or Lose makes the show itself all the more impressive; it could have easily wound up feeling as focus-grouped and over-engineered as any number of more muddled Disney projects. Instead, it hits that sweet spot where kids, especially those close to the ages of the characters, can lock into it, and adults can marvel at its cleverness and honesty. The show proves that Pixar is more than capable of continuing to innovate in family-friendly animation – when their parent company lets them.
