Turning Red (2022)
Directed by Domee Shi
Thirteen-year-old Mei is experiencing the awkwardness of being a teenager with a twist – when she gets too excited, she transforms into a giant red panda.
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Not only must Mei negotiate her hormones and control them at school, where a braces-mouthed bully reminiscent of Sid from Toy Story (1995) taunts her, but she must contend with her mother.
Before Pixar returns to the Toy Story franchise with Lightyear, Turning Red represents a reminder as to the wonderful originality they are capable of when not designing films to sell toys.
Such old-fogey objections aside, “Turning Red” represents a fresh change from traditional Pixar fare, eschewing the slightly fuddy-duddy nostalgia of “Toy Story” and “Cars” for a this-side-of-Y2K millennial mindset.
It feels wrong to see the production company of Toy Story and Monsters Inc. finally working with original ideas again and only for those movies to be subjected to the comfort of your couch.
The Toy Story pictures, for example, demonstrated a total understanding of the meaning playthings have in our lives.
Toy Story’s putting away of childish things devastated us with the bittersweetness of aging, pristinely packaged inside the odd couple act of Woody and Buzz.
What’s most satisfying about “Turning Red” is the degree to which Shi gets to share so many aspects of her upbringing — based not on field trips to a foreign country, à la “Ratatouille” and “Up,” but on the cuisine and customs of its lead creator.
And unless you’re including Russell as the second lead in 2009’s Up , the movie also features the studio’s first Asian lead character.
There may not be a gut-punch moment of overwhelming emotion like, say, the climax of Toy Story 3, the profoundly unexpected imagination of Up, or the form-busting audaciousness of Wall-E (though the plush-toy-ready Panda Mei is as easy a product to sell as Toy Story 4′s Forky).
Maybe Turning Red isn’t as “ugly cry” moving as Inside Out or Up, but there are tears to be shed about the world seeing more and more representation of Asian American girls in film.
Topped off with great voice work from Chiang and Oh, it’s a Pixar worthy effort that can sit on the shelf next to the classics like “Up,” “WALL-E’ and “Toy Story.”
The film is most notable for being several firsts for Pixar: the first film directed solo by a woman, the first set in Canada, and the first to center on a character of Asian descent ( Up had Russell, but that movie was about Carl).
Mei’s ladylike, rule-bound mother may be too prudish to refer to her daughter’s period directly, but the screenwriters for Turning Red (Shi and Julia Cho) have no such qualms: Their heroine’s uncontrollable and often embarrassing girl-to-panda transformation is the clearest movie metaphor for the onset of a young woman’s menstrual cycle since Sissy Spacek got drenched in pig blood at the prom in the terrifying finale of Carrie .
Besides, this mother is far more supportive than shouting, “They’re all gonna laugh at you!” like the underrated horror masterpiece “Carrie” (1976).
Yeah, “Teen Wolf” did it first – and “Turning Red” shares a few aspects with that 1980s Michael J. Fox hit – but Shi crafts a heartwarming, empowering and fun narrative about female puberty and a changing mother/daughter relationship.
Sure, Teen Wolf sorta got there first, but this is smart, elevated children’s fare.
Though it may take a page or two from the “Teen Wolf” playbook, the premise of “Turning Red” is a more thoughtful repackaging of that narrative.
Adolescence is tough enough without turning into a hideous monster, and movies from Teen Wolf to Ginger Snaps have gotten plenty of mileage out of conflating those two experiences.
Yes, there’s more than a hint of “Teen Wolf” in this script by Julia Cho and director Domee Shi, who directed the adorable and Oscar-winning Chinese mom and her baby dumpling short, “Bao” a few years back.
What if Pixar made Teen Wolf for younger girls?
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Even though the connection between Turning Red and other intimate non-franchise Pixar films is palpable — it reminded me of Inside Out (2015) but also Soul (2020) — the fact that there’s a woman at the helm really shows this time.
It comes from Pixar and is the studio's most inward-looking feature since 2015's "Inside Out."
The first Pixar film set in Canada and the first to be solely directed by a woman, it’s also the best Pixar film since “Inside Out” (2015), for which Shi was a story artist.
In doing so, Shi completes a heroic journey from being a storyboard artist on “Inside Out” (2015) to becoming the first woman to direct a Pixar short with the Oscar-winning “Bao” (2018) to finally becoming the first woman ever to direct a Pixar film solo in “Turning Red” (2022).
Pixar often confronts the way children manage their emotions, with Inside Out (2015) standing above all others; the studio has even addressed similar issues of mother-daughter relationships in Brave (2012).
Thematically, apart from Pete Docter’s introspective Inside Out , this feels much more in line with Isao Takahata’s wheelhouse, particularly Only Yesterday .
But it equally feels like a spiritual sequel to (or perhaps spiritual retribution for) "Brave," the film for which Pixar hired its first female director, Brenda Chapman, to craft a personal story inspired by her relationship with her daughter — before firing and replacing her with a male director who rewrote huge chunks of the movie.
Isn’t it depressing that Shi came to be the first solely credited female Pixar director only because Brenda Chapman was unceremoniously dumped from her 2012 film Brave midway through its production?
As well as Pixar’s first solo female director (Brenda Chapman was joint director on Brave and she was sacked, so not a studio equality highpoint), Shi has created the studio’s most diverse cast of characters to date.
A decade ago, the studio booted director Brenda Chapman off “Brave,” which makes “Turning Red” — its 25th full-length toon and third direct-to-Disney Plus release — the only one to be fully overseen by a woman.
Brenda Chapman shared the directing credit on “Brave”(2012).
She is preceded by Brave ‘s Brenda Chapman of course, but Chapman suffered the indignity of being replaced in mid-production of her own screenplay and had to fight to be allowed on-stage when the film won an Academy Award.
Consider the magical scene in which Mei meets her mother as a young girl and gets to hear what pushy parents so rarely tell their children — perhaps the most resonant expression of long-withheld approval since the beauty parlor scene in “The Joy Luck Club,” when Tsai Chin’s character assures her daughter, “Now you make me happy.”
Which is not to say that “Turning Red” — a cheeky title for a movie that sometimes plays like “Carrie” with the cutes, or “The Joy Luck Club” meets “Ginger Snaps” — deals purely in the metaphorical.
What Shi and Cho have crafted feels like a curious combination of Greta Gerwig’s coming-of-age drama Lady Bird (ironically, also set in 2002), Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade , and The Incredible Hulk .
“Turning Red” is perhaps the best take on adolescence since Bo Burnham’s “Eighth Grade.”
Pitched somewhere between Eighth Grade , The Incredible Hulk and Scott Pilgrim , it externalises Mei’s inner transformation into an allegory for bodily changes and evolving interpersonal relationships.
Panda aside, Mei's journey to young womanhood is similar to those seen in cringe-comedies like Eighth Grade, Pen15, and Bob's Burgers' Tina Belcher plot lines.
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But it’s important to note that, contrary to what you may have heard, “Turning Red” isn’t “about” a girl getting her first period any more than “Steamboat Willie” is “about” a mouse that wears pants.
What Shi and Cho have crafted feels like a curious combination of Greta Gerwig’s coming-of-age drama Lady Bird (ironically, also set in 2002), Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade , and The Incredible Hulk .
Writer/director Domee Shi bases Mei on her own experiences growing up in Toronto, just like Greta Gerwig did with Sacramento in “Lady Bird” (2017).
Turning Red ‘s weirdness is an integral element though because without it the film would probably too closely reflect its influences — PEN15 , Teen Wolf , and Lady Bird .