‘Win or Lose’ Goes Inside Out to Explore Softball as an Unpredictable Game of Life from Multiple Perspectives
“Win or Lose,” Pixar’s first original TV series, takes a “Rashomon”-like approach to a co-ed middle school softball team called the Pickles as it heads to the championship game. Each of the eight episodes revolves around a different character, replaying the penultimate game from multiple perspectives to reveal the disparity between public and private behavior.
IndieWire got a peek at the first four episodes: The first kicks off with Laurie (Rosie Foss), the insecure daughter of Coach Dan (Will Forte), who’s hitless and constantly breaks out into a sweat that eventually transforms into a blobby companion called Sweaty (Jo Firestone). The second focuses on Frank (Josh Thomson), the fearful umpire and school teacher who hides from everyone in video game-like armor during awkward situations. The third spotlights Rochelle (Milan Ray), the bossy catcher who has a day from hell, and the fourth pivots to Rochelle’s social media-obsessed mom, Vanessa (Rosa Salazar), imagining all of her followers as pink, blobby cheerleaders.
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“Win or Lose” is written and directed by Carrie Hobson and Michael Yates, who worked together as story artists on “Toy Story 4” and conceived the idea after discovering how different their recollections were. “We were office mates, and I’d leave a meeting thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, that went terrible, they’re going to fire me,'” Yates told IndieWire.
“And I’d be like, ‘You’re spiraling, it’s all fine,'” added Hobson. “And then the next day, I’d be thinking something’s terrible. We realized we often would have different perspectives on life. You can live this same experience and then come away with something completely different from it.”
Since they both adore sports, that became the perfect venue for exploring winning and losing and, by extension, how it translates to life. Hobson latched onto softball because of her personal experiences playing it as a kid.
“ Carrie often talked about how softball is like a lot of waiting around,” Yates said. “And then, all of a sudden, the ball will hit to you, and it’s like, ‘OK, now perform, perform, perform, perform!’ And we really thought that was a nice metaphor for life. How you could just be going through your everyday life, and then something happens. And it’s up to you to react, whether you’re going to hit that ball or let it go right past you.”
Figuring out the details of the story and characters came through a combination of autobiographical inspiration and personal input from the Pixar team. “Win or Lose” then became an intricate puzzle filled with overlapping moments (such as a thrilling, game-ending double play), strategic foreshadowing, and emotional payoffs. There’s even shout out to Pixar’s upcoming alien abduction comedy, “Elio.”
”We had so many whiteboards and pinboards with cards, different color-coded cards that would represent if a scene happened multiple times from different points of view in an episode,” Hobson said. “So it visually helped us track the show. And then we had whiteboards with the plot within an episode, and the character throughline, but with the question the audience will be asking about the character.”
However, they learned through trial and error to avoid revisiting too many scenes. “We realized that unless you have a new piece of information or something revealed to the audience, it’s not as satisfying to watch it again from a different perspective,” said Yates.
Aesthetically, each episode has its own look tied to the personality of the character explored, which allowed Pixar to use lots of caricaturing and cartoony effects through mixed media. Each main character also has a distinct color palette. Noah Klocek, the production designer, then elevated that with lighting designer Brian Boyd to create positive-negative color representation for their winning or losing behavior.
”We really wanted this idea of getting inside of a character’s head and experiencing life through the way they experience it,” Yates said. “But our mantra was: What can we do in animation that couldn’t be done in live action? So once we figured out what the storyline was for that character and what they were going through, we would experiment with personifying that feeling that they have.”
For example, the anxiety of trying to live up to a father’s expectations. “I would often mention that nervousness of just being sweaty,” Hobson said. “And so we took that idea and every drawing you would do was the character always sweaty. And then one day we were like, ‘What if we took that sweat and made it sentient?'” That became Laurie’s Sweaty.
The “Win or Lose” team also experimented with 2D animation, whose special pipeline using TVPaint projected onto 3D cards, was leveraged by the “Inside Out 2” team for the pre-school characters Bloofy and Pouchy. “When we were coming up with some of these animation devices, where the visuals described how someone felt, we knew we wanted 2D to be part of that process,” Yates said.
“ And in the later episodes,” he continued, “you’ll see we did two different versions of it: One was bringing an imagination to life and the other was like a flattened stage design for the backgrounds when they recede from the camera. We thought that was a good metaphor for the show when the characters feel like they’re the star of their life.”
Meanwhile, the last four episodes revolve around Coach Dan and three other players, including Kai, the trans character (voiced by trans actress Chanel Stewart) whose gender identity was removed by Disney. The creators, though, confirmed that Kai “still plays a big role on the show.”
“I think, for us, Kai’s episode is all about the pressure that people kind of put on themselves,” Hobson said. “Every character in our show, they’re facing their own personal opportunity to win or their own personal loss. And they’re having to figure out how to react to that, so what’s happening off the field is a mirror to what’s happening on the field.”
“Win or Lose” currently streams on Disney+.
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