ADVERTISEMENT American hip-hop star Snoop Dogg is facing backlash over comments about 2022’s Pixar film Lightyear, after he said he was “scared” to take his grandchildren to the cinema over LGBTQ+ representation.
The rapper made an appearance on the It’s Giving… Podcast where he recalled being taken by surprise to see the Toy Story spinoff, as it featured a montage of two women sharing a kiss and raising a child together.
He said this led to a whole bunch of questions from his grandchildren about same-sex couples that he said, “I don’t have an answer for.”
“They’re like, ‘She had a baby – with another woman,’” Snoop said on the podcast. “Well, my grandson, in the middle of the movie is like, ‘Papa Snoop? How she have a baby with a woman? She’s a woman!’ I didn’t come in here for this shit. I just came to watch the goddamn movie.”
He said that the moment “f*cked me up,” adding: “I’m like, scared to go to the movies. Y’all throwing me in the middle of shit that I don’t have an answer for… It threw me for a loop. I’m like, ‘What part of the movie was this?’ These are kids. We have to show that at this age? They’re going to ask questions. I don’t have the answer.”
The segment has since been deleted from the YouTube upload, with a now-noticeable cut and topic pivot around the 30-minute mark, when Snoop says, “It’s what you see – they’re putting it everywhere.”
Snoop’s comments went viral and the backlash was immediate.
Conversely, some people stood up for Snoop online, highlighting tokenistic Hollywood studio efforts to crowbar LGBTQ content in films.
In Lightyear, the origin story of the human Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear, Buzz’s best friend Alisha Hawthorne (Uzo Aduba) reveals that she is engaged to a character named Kiko. At their 40th anniversary celebration, they share a kiss.
Due to that scene, the film didn’t play in theaters in Middle East markets like Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Oman, and Qatar. The People’s Republic of China requested that the scene be removed; Disney declined to make the cuts. In Singapore, the kissing scene resulted in the film being allowed only for people above 16 years of age.
Speaking to Variety at the time of the film’s release, Chris Evans – who voices Buzz Lightyear – said about the scene: “It’s nice, and it’s wonderful, it makes me happy. It’s tough to not be a little frustrated that it even has to be a topic of discussion.”
He added: “The goal is that we can get to a point where it is the norm, and that this doesn’t have to be some uncharted waters, that eventually this is just the way it is. That representation across the board is how we make films.”
