Review: Win or Lose – Episodes 1-4 (Disney+)

By John Corrado

In their thirty years of feature films, Pixar Animation Studios has been known for their innovative and imaginative storytelling. Now they’ve adapted that to a serialized format in Win or Lose, the new Disney Plus streaming series from co-creators, co-directors and co-writers Carrie Hobson and Michael Yates.

It’s an ambitious gambit from the studio, who are experimenting with episodic, long-form storytelling for the first time (although shifting release dates means that the Inside Out spinoff series Dream Productions technically came out first).

In Win or Lose, we focus on a middle school softball team called the Pickles. The whole thing is set in the week leading up to their big game. The twist is that each of the eight episodes are told from the perspective of a different character.

The grand vision for the series starts to emerge across the first four episodes, which were provided for review. This Rashomon-like approach allows the series to explore the same events from multiple angles, while going deeper into the lives of different characters and what they are individually going through in the lead up to the championship. A supporting character who appears in one will become the main character in another, or little moments will take on new context.

As it alternates between kid and adult characters, Win or Lose introduces a variety of mature themes (loneliness, economic anxiety, parental expectations). In the first episode, we meet Laurie (Rosie Foss), the daughter of Coach Dan (Will Forte), who worries that she isn’t good enough to impress her dad. A personified sweat blob (voiced by Jo Firestone), that constantly grows in size, represents the voice of doubt in her head. It’s perhaps what the characters of Shame and Guilt would have been like if they weren’t excised from Inside Out 2.

In the second episode, we pivot to focus on Frank (Josh Thomson), the team’s umpire, a lonely teacher in his thirties trying to figure out his dating life. It’s a piece of impressively mature storytelling that finds clever ways to explore the interiority of the character. Also taking centre stage are Rochelle (Milan Ray), a young star player on the team, and her overworked single mom Vanessa (Rosa Salazar), who’s faced with a constant need for social media validation.

The dramatic storytelling is heightened by a number of creative visual metaphors; i.e., Frank is shown with imaginary armour that represents the walls he puts up around himself, while Rochelle morphs into wearing a power suit when she has to take charge and be the adult. The character designs themselves are highly stylized, and the animators are experimenting with a variety of different animation styles for the backgrounds, including anime influences and 2D elements.

At times the show seems too ambitious. It’s jam-packed with ideas, and the twenty minute runtimes of the individual episodes occasionally don’t quite feel long enough to fully explore all of them. The series has also spent years in development, with a variety of shifting release dates and some behind the scenes controversy that suggest a lot of tinkering (including removing a transgender storyline from the show).

If it’s hard to judge the full vision of Win or Lose having only seen half the series, the show remains engaging and entertaining as it pivots between characters and reveals new elements. It’s somewhat of a departure for Pixar while also showcasing more familiar elements, allowing the studio to successfully adapt their winning formula to a new format.