B+Directed by Domee Shi Starring Rosalie Chiang and Sandra Oh Review by Jon Kissel |  |
Domee Shi’s Oscar-winning animated short Bao features an ignored Chinese mother imagining the titular dumpling as a version of her son. The bouncing baby bao develops its own interests that don’t involve the mother until, in a fit of rage, the mother eats the bao. Irrational spurts of hatred between mothers and their children seem to occupy a large part of Shi’s creative imagination, as the same thing drives Turning Red, her feature debut. This time, the rage is directed from daughter to mother in the latest, and hopefully last, Pixar film that debuted only on Disney+. After Soul, Luca, and Turning Red, Pixar has been on a streak of imaginative, affecting, and original entries, only for their parent studio to dump them onto their streaming service and ignore theaters completely. One would hope that Pixar doesn’t turn into a ferocious beast that lashes out against its legal guardian, but it would be understandable if it did.
Turning Red takes biographical details from Shi’s life as the child of Chinese immigrants who settled in Toronto and spices them up with shape-shifting magic. The Shi stand-in is Mei Lee (Rosalie Chiang), a supremely confident 13-year-old girl who excels in school while helping her parents Ming (Sandra Oh) and Jin (Orion Lee) run their Buddhist temple. Mei’s life is tightly controlled by her mother but she expresses herself socially through her close-knit friend group of unflappable Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), fiery Abby (Hyein Park), and characteristic-less Miriam (Ava Morse). The picture of Mei’s life in Ming’s head is that of a dutiful daughter who enjoys the time she spends with her family, but Ming has no sense of Mei’s growing interest in boys and thinks little of her friend group. When Mei’s doodles starring the callow but cute local convenience store clerk are found by Ming, she drags Mei to the store to confront him. Mei meekly accepts this humiliation and destroys the rest of her drawings, but she awakens the next morning in the body of a giant, stinky, fluffy red panda.
It’s not difficult to draw metaphorical conclusions about a teen suddenly experiencing these kinds of changes. Turning Red’s function isn’t as a puberty metaphor, but as a visceral exemplar of the fiery feelings that develop between parents and children, even when everything appears to be going fine. That feeling of being embarrassed by one’s parents is one thing. Another is the total obliviousness to how their actions might be interpreted by the child or by the child’s peers. In a moment like the aforementioned run-in with the clerk and another equally horrifying scene, the child has nowhere to put their fury without making the situation worse. These incidents are so intense that they implant forever, and Turning Red is one of the few films in memory that get this phenomenon exactly right. As introduced, a character like Mei has no language or ability to tell Ming that she’s developed her own will and life away from the family, and her body reacts to this adolescent injustice by creating a new id-fueled version of itself.
As the film sets up its final dilemma of whether Mei will attempt to cure her panda-ness or go to a boy band concert with her friends, Turning Red further demonstrates how damaged her relationship with Ming has become. Mei is able to control her transformations through meditation, but the thing she focuses on isn’t a happy family moment. Her mind palace is instead populated by her friends, people who don’t ask anything of her but her presence. Turning Red isn’t exactly a refutation of the tiger mom trope, though that reading is there. There’s nothing culturally specific about a parent trying to constrain the world of their child, and the film shows how much of a losing proposition such a constriction is. Keep putting walls up around a human biologically driven to escape them, and they’ll find craftier ways to break them down. Treat them like the child they no longer are and cement their footing in a world that no longer contains the parent.
What is culturally specific in Turning Red is an homage to Asian animation, specifically Japanese aesthetics. The Pixar house style dominates, with all the technical precision that’s most represented here by all the lines of code dedicated to the individual hairs on Mei’s red panda belly. Within that framework are obvious callbacks to Totoro from Studio Ghibli and the anime obsession with making food look as delicious as possible. Mei’s outsize facial expressions aren’t typical for Pixar, but they work here alongside the anime influence. Being a novice to that genre and style, it seems that much of it is about gigantic teenage emotions expressing themselves through fantasy or sci-fi, and Turning Red fits within that tradition.
By turns adorable and evocative, Turning Red is a strong Pixar entry that only misses the studios top-tier because they’ve churned out such great work for so long. It works best as a child-parent story, one where the kid is more or less alright and it’s the parent who needs to consider their strategies. With two hits, Shi has perhaps exhausted her biographical material and that’s often a fraught place for a director. Her clarity on a true and underexplored part of being a young teen speaks to a healthy amount of empathetic perception, and gives the viewer confidence that, like Mei, she’s going to be fine if only her parent/parent company can get out of her way. B+
It’s not difficult to draw metaphorical conclusions about a teen suddenly experiencing these kinds of changes. Turning Red’s function isn’t as a puberty metaphor, but as a visceral exemplar of the fiery feelings that develop between parents and children, even when everything appears to be going fine. That feeling of being embarrassed by one’s parents is one thing. Another is the total obliviousness to how their actions might be interpreted by the child or by the child’s peers. In a moment like the aforementioned run-in with the clerk and another equally horrifying scene, the child has nowhere to put their fury without making the situation worse. These incidents are so intense that they implant forever, and Turning Red is one of the few films in memory that get this phenomenon exactly right. As introduced, a character like Mei has no language or ability to tell Ming that she’s developed her own will and life away from the family, and her body reacts to this adolescent injustice by creating a new id-fueled version of itself.
As the film sets up its final dilemma of whether Mei will attempt to cure her panda-ness or go to a boy band concert with her friends, Turning Red further demonstrates how damaged her relationship with Ming has become. Mei is able to control her transformations through meditation, but the thing she focuses on isn’t a happy family moment. Her mind palace is instead populated by her friends, people who don’t ask anything of her but her presence. Turning Red isn’t exactly a refutation of the tiger mom trope, though that reading is there. There’s nothing culturally specific about a parent trying to constrain the world of their child, and the film shows how much of a losing proposition such a constriction is. Keep putting walls up around a human biologically driven to escape them, and they’ll find craftier ways to break them down. Treat them like the child they no longer are and cement their footing in a world that no longer contains the parent.
What is culturally specific in Turning Red is an homage to Asian animation, specifically Japanese aesthetics. The Pixar house style dominates, with all the technical precision that’s most represented here by all the lines of code dedicated to the individual hairs on Mei’s red panda belly. Within that framework are obvious callbacks to Totoro from Studio Ghibli and the anime obsession with making food look as delicious as possible. Mei’s outsize facial expressions aren’t typical for Pixar, but they work here alongside the anime influence. Being a novice to that genre and style, it seems that much of it is about gigantic teenage emotions expressing themselves through fantasy or sci-fi, and Turning Red fits within that tradition.
By turns adorable and evocative, Turning Red is a strong Pixar entry that only misses the studios top-tier because they’ve churned out such great work for so long. It works best as a child-parent story, one where the kid is more or less alright and it’s the parent who needs to consider their strategies. With two hits, Shi has perhaps exhausted her biographical material and that’s often a fraught place for a director. Her clarity on a true and underexplored part of being a young teen speaks to a healthy amount of empathetic perception, and gives the viewer confidence that, like Mei, she’s going to be fine if only her parent/parent company can get out of her way. B+
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