Pixar introduced their first animated, LGBT character in their latest movie, Onward, but the scene was yet again censored by Russia.

(Fret not, for this scene isn’t much of a spoiler.) There is a scene with a police character, who at one point during conversation, addresses she has a ‘girlfriend’. Russia changed this to ‘partner’ during their screenings. This effectively removes any indication of the character’s sexuality in the film.

The character, named Officer Specter, is a cyclops voiced by openly gay screenwriter and actor Lena Waithe, who acted in Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One and TV shows such as Westworld, Transparent, and This is Us. 

This isn’t the first time Russia has censored any LGBT reference in movies. Of recent memory, they censored many scenes in Taron Egerton’s Rocketman and another single scene in Avengers: Endgame where dialogue was changed to hide the fact that a character (played by Joe Russo) was gay.

It is yet to be seen how Malaysia will handle said scene when the film arrives in local cinemas on March 6, though if I have to assume, they just might do exactly the same thing, or just silence the word (like they do with cuss words). Though, I’d like to believe that they would not.

In Rocketman, Malaysia did censor many scenes, but some can be classified as scenes they would have censored anyway regardless of whether it was LGBT or not.

However, in Avengers: Endgame, Malaysia did not censor or alter the scene. The scene focuses on the character lamenting on how his date went with another man. Malaysia might not have altered the scene because it isn’t very obvious, but who knows.

I guess we’ll find out if they decided to censor the scene when Onward is released in cinemas on 5th March, 2020.