Here is the tool Pixar invented to improve gender distribution

Pixar script writer Jesica Heidt has invented a tool that balances genres in animated films.

-

• Jessica Heidt, scriptwriter at Pixar, tells

   Inside Pixar

  how she came up with the idea of ​​a tool that allows animated films to be more representative of society.

• It was while working on

  Cars

  , in 2015, that Jessica Heidt had the click.

What if there was a tool that allowed films and cartoons to be more representative of society?

This is the brilliant idea of ​​Jessica Heidt, scriptwriter at Pixar, who explains the genesis of her discovery in the documentary

, broadcast on Disney +.

While working on

, in 2015, Jessica Heidt had the click.

During the production phase, she tells herself that the animated characters all seem to be kind of the same.

So she counts because, for her, as a scriptwriter, it is the easiest: “I see the text and I can count it,” she says in the documentary.

She collects all the names of the protagonists in an Excel, which will reveal the imbalance: 90% of the characters are male… Jessica Heidt cannot be resigned to it.

The film is already well advanced but, by speaking to the whole team, and in particular to the writers, they and she manage to catch up a little together.

The final version of

will have 75% male characters, she tells

.

Immediate, but timid effects

Jessica Heidt gave us an appointment via Zoom.

She gives us a big smile through the screen, against a background of blue sky and colored walls.

Those of the Pixar studios, in Emeryville, where the script goes behind the scenes of the famous company.

After

, Jessica Heidt continued to fill in her Excel tables, then turned to Josh Minor, who takes care of the software at home.

With a little code, the duo transformed the idea of ​​the feminist scriptwriter into a powerful tool, able to read the text to find numbers.

Counting had immediate, but timid, effects.

From 75% on average of male characters in all Pixar films, the figure has dropped since 2015 to “60% / 65%”, she estimates.

The last film,

can boast of an almost perfect parity: “It's 50-50!

She said to

.

"It's hard to revolutionize the system"

Next step: make the tool more efficient, by not only integrating gender, but also “race” (in the social sense), sexual orientation, and other criteria.

“We are not yet counting the number of words the characters say, nor the number of scenes,” explains Jessica Heidt, who would like these developments to see the light of day.

And why not, one day, make this tool available to other companies?

"We think that it would be extraordinary to make it free", she enthuses, even if technical considerations make the operation obviously complicated for the moment.

“It's hard to revolutionize the system but I find that at Pixar there has never been any deliberate resistance against this change,” comments Jessica Heidt in the film.

For the one who collected the prize for the heroine of the year of her company, the lack of parity is not due at Pixar to a conscious desire to exclude women.

Rather to conventional mechanisms, no one having really been aware, before counting, that the situation was so critical.

It took a woman's determination and patience for Pixar to do this thing that seems so simple, so obvious: counting.

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