A new trailer for Finding Dory dropped today. While there”s plenty to squee over (baby Dory! Octopus antics! Peter Gabriel paired with Pixar yet again!), what the Internet is slowly starting to notice and get excited over is the two characters who just might be Pixar”s first lesbian couple.
As Twitter user @DLthings pointed out, the two women outside the Marine Life Institute in the trailer might hold this distinction.
Here they are:
They appear shortly after the one-minute mark in the trailer released this morning:
This comes a few days after a petition to give Frozen“s Elsa a girlfriend made the rounds online. (Elsa herself a.k.a. Idina Menzel responded, “I think it”s great.”)
There has been speculation before that Pixar had given audiences a lesbian character, Brave“s Merida being a notable instance of such theories. (Because if a princess prefers honing her archery skills to marrying a male suitor she just met, the only possible explanation for such shocking non-boy-craziness is she”s lesbian.)
Of all the opportunities for Pixar to make landmark strides in LGBT representation, Finding Dory would be an apt choice of film. Voicing everyone”s favorite blue tang in the sequel is of course Ellen DeGeneres, whose coming out in 1997 paved the way for fellow gay entertainers to speak openly about their identity.
From the little we see of this couple in the new Finding Dory trailer, we really don”t see enough to know whether these two women are romantically linked or not.
But if this is Pixar”s first lesbian couple, that”s definitely some positive progress. Though relegating that distinction to two fringe, possibly nameless characters might not go over well. In 2012, when a producer said Disney Junior's Sofia the First “is Latina,” the following reports had some upset that the landmark “first Hispanic Disney princess” wasn”t in a big screen feature. Disney Junior ended up backtracking with a statement that said “Sofia is a fairytale in a fairytale world” with her fictitious country “inspired by Spain.” On the other hand, representation even in background characters in film can be valuable in challenging gender norms, as Geena Davis, for one, highlighted when she noticed on the set of Stuart Little that toy race boats were only being given to boys.
HitFix has reached out to Disney for comment about this. If we get a response, we”ll update you.
In the meantime, enjoy this gif of Frozen character Oaken”s family (and husband?!) and the Poe Dameron lip bite that ignited the hopes of every Poe/Finn shipper.