Kottke posted about this Pixar SparkShort this week and, as a 13-year industry “veteran” who still has teams who are mostly men, it really hit me. As Kottke writes, “The story was inspired by Lester’s experience working in animation as the only woman at her company.”
In order to do the thing that I loved, I sort of became one of the guys. And then I came to Pixar and I started to work on teams with women for the first time. And that actually made me realize how much of the female aspect of myself I had buried and left behind.
Yes, it’s a fun eight-minute Pixar short and no, I don’t ACTUALLY think of myself as a pink ball of yarn, but Pixar knows how to make a potentially heavy-handed metaphor work.