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Disney’s Onward to feature its first openly LGBTQ character, voiced by Lena Waithe
Lena Waithe of Masters of None will be heard as the voice of a cop, the first openly LGBTQ character in Disney’s long list of films.
Disney’s upcoming animated fantasy film Onward will feature the first openly LGBTQ animated character of the production house, reported Fox News. The voice for the character which is a cop will be given by Lena Waithe.
While Waithe is all set to lend her voice to the first-ever openly LGBTQ character, Disney has also featured other LGBTQ characters in their live-action films, Fox News stated in its report.
In Onwards, actors Tom Holland and Chris Pratt will be seen portraying brothers on a quest to resurrect their father magically for a day.
Besides, Waithe, others who will be featured in the film include Ali Wong, Octavia Spencer, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Tracey Ullman.
Onward, which screened at the Berlinale on Friday, is Pixar Animation Studios’ first original animated feature since Coco in 2017 and is closer to the world of Harry Potter than Buzz Lightyear. It is a tale of unicorns and magic in which two brothers -- Ian and Barley Lightfoot voiced by Holland and Pratt -- have 24 hours to reconnect with their father who died many years earlier, before Ian, the younger of the two, was even born. It is a buddy movie that opens up fraternal relations as well as the father-son relation.
But things do not quite go as planned, as one might expect in a Pixar quest movie, and the two brothers stumble through a fantasy universe with magic wands, spells, dragons and unicorns. In some respects it unfurls like a video game, a world unfamiliar to director Dan Scanlon who previously teamed up with Onward producer Kori Dae on the 2013 film Monsters University.
“I didn’t know very much about that but luckily we are working with Pixar and they brought their love of these games, and they taught us a lot,” Scanlon told a news conference prior to the Berlin screening on Friday. The story came from Scanlon who lost his own father when he was a child.
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