Turning Red (2022)
Directed by Domee Shi
Written by Domee Shi, Julia Cho, and Sarah Streicher
Starring Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Ava Morse, and Hyein Park
“My panda, MY CHOICE!”
The Stage.
A thirteen-year-old girl wakes up one morning and realizes that she turns into a giant red panda when she’s stressed out.
The Review.
The lead up to the release of Turning Red has been something else. There’s been backlash because the film was not offered a theatrical release, playing solely on Disney+ (just as Soul was) and then the talk was all about how Pixar had made a ‘getting your first period’ movie, but that’s not necessarily true, and then finally, there were reviews that posited that if you weren’t a minority woman, it would be impossible to connect with it. At its core, Turning Red is a movie about growing up and finding your place, about becoming a woman, and generational trauma. It’s a tale as old as time, but here it’s presented with a new twist on visual representation alongside fantastic animation.
Mei is a typical teenage girl living in Toronto’s Chinatown - she plays an instrument, is discovering boys, and loves the boy band 4 Town. After school, she helps run a Chinese temple, a local tourist attraction owned by her family. After a tense fight with her overprotective, conservative mother, she wakes up in the form of an oversized red panda. Almost instantly, she realizes that if she can keep calm, she’ll turn back into a human…easy enough, right? Except she runs into stress at school almost instantly. As the film progresses, Mei has to both deal with her newfound inconvenience, as well as her mother, finding out that the more they grow apart, the more they actually have in common…culminating with an exciting sequence at Toronto’s Skydome.
This film is unique in that all of the department leads were women, which makes the story and characters feel true to life. It was directed by Domee Shi and was her first feature. Previously, she’d worked for Pixar as a storyboard artist on films like Toy Story 4 and Incredibles 2, and directed the really great Pixar short Bao. Par for the course, the animation looks fantastic and the art style is pretty unique; it has a very ‘anime’ vibe to it in terms of movement and facial expressions, including some ‘super saiyan’ kinds of battle sequences as the film progresses. It almost felt like Scott Pilgrim if told from the view of a thirteen-year-old girl. There’s also a delicious nightmare sequence that’s really well constructed, one that my three-year-old thought was pretty scary. The story structure is also pretty unique - you might think that the film is leading up to a ritual sequence, the only way to get rid of this “panda curse”, and of course that ritual happens…but it does so at the end of the second act, leaving a whole third of the story still to come.
The End.
Turning Red doesn’t feel like it was made for me, which is totally fine, but I still found it really entertaining. That being said, if you connect with the family structure or identify with the characters, you’ll get even more out of it. It’s a gorgeous coming of age picture about dealing with puberty - a time that’s uncomfortable for everyone - finally becoming mature enough to develop your own interests while still trying to be the person your parents want you to be, and all the shit that comes along with it.
