Summary
Pixar returns with one of their most heartfelt, hyperkinetic and genuinely fun coming of age films in years. More importantly, it’s a film that recognises the importance of being seen.
It’s been an odd couple of years for Pixar. While they have been on a streak of original films since Onward, the impact of the pandemic has made the former box office Goliath a staple of Disney’s streaming service. TURNING RED continues that trend, debuting directly to homes around the world, but breaks new ground in so many other ways.
In fact, it’s weird to even have to type this in 2022, but director Domee Shi’s debut film is Pixar’s first all-female led film. Not just in terms of its delightfully crafted set of characters, but the creative team behind the scenes as well. Shi is best known for her charming 2018 short Bao, also the first Pixar short to be directed by a woman, and here she teams up with playwright and television writer Julia Cho for a unique spin on a coming of age comedy.
Set in 2002 in the Chinatown district of Toronto, Meilin “Mei” Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) is a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl who, despite her mother’s (Sandra Oh) expectations of academic perfection, wants to march to the beat of her own drum, wrap herself in the warmth of friends’ love and swoon over boy band 4☆Town. Yet when she discovers the family curse — transforming into a large red panda whenever she experiences heightened emotions — she tries to balance all of her responsibilities and desires in a surefire recipe for catastrophe.
You don’t have to go too deep into the well to guess what this film metaphorically represents. It’s right there in the title. Disney even allows the subtext to be made text, with Mei getting a brief explanation of pads and tampons from her mother. It might be a simple thing, especially at this juncture (don’t make me tap the calendar again), but a major animated film having multiple shots of Maxi Pads is a positive step from the studio. Disney sure has come a long way since the 1946 educational short, The Story of Menstruation.
There’s another equally important piece of representation here. It’s not just the thoroughly intimate Asian-Canadian experience, something Shi seems to effortlessly weave into a traditional Pixar structure. (There’s the emergency arrival of the aunties, for example, that any number of families are sure to relate to). This is important, and continues on from Raya and the Dragon and Shang-Chi in the studio’s attempts to be more inclusive. Yet the other moments of ‘being seen’ here are the ways in which Shi takes fandom completely seriously. 4☆Town might be the epitome of late 90s/early 2000s cheese to us, but they are a way of life to this group of misfits. If the musical Fangirls taught us anything, it’s how formative, supportive, life-changing and valid fandom is during one’s teen years.
It’s a shame that TURNING RED wound up debuting on the small screen, as then lush animation and innovative style screams for a cinema release. There’s the almost invisible magic, like the phenomenal textures on animal fur, the details from the streets of Toronto, or the veritable feast of lovingly rendered food porn as Mei’s dad cooks. Like Mitchels vs. The Machines last year, Shi also uses the hyperkinetic language of comics and cartoons in a series of non-sequiturs, fourth-wall breaking narration, speed-lines and anime-inspired cutaways for wide-eyed emotional reactions. In a word, it’s just fun.
When Pixar next returns to our screens, it will be with a more familiar franchise name: Lightyear. While that film aims to do something new with the Toy Story universe, one can’t help the feeling that Disney-Pixar has created a tiered structure in its release patterns. Still, the simultaneous worldwide release to well over 120 million users increases the chances of someone seeing this, and hopefully seeing themselves, in one of the most heartfelt animated films in recent memory.
2022 | USA | DIRECTOR: Domee Shi | WRITERS: Julia Cho, Domee Shi | CAST: Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Ava Morse, Hyein Park, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Orion Lee, Wai Ching Ho, Tristan Allerick Chen, James Hong | DISTRIBUTOR: Disney/Disney+ | RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 11 March 2022 (Global)
