WesternAnimation A thoughtful, well-constructed conversation.
After her successful turn telling a personal story in Bao, Domee Shi was given the chance to expand to a film and further explore themes of her childhood and the generational divide between Westernized children and their Chinese Canadian parents.
Meilin Lee is the straight-A perfect child who works in her family temple in Toronto, but she's already begun living something of a double life, with her secret identity of sorts being an ordinary 13-year-old girl. As she starts to confront her interests in pop music and boys, she finds herself constantly humiliated by her overbearing, conservative, and entitled mother, convinced all of Mei's verboten interests have been forced upon her by the evil people around her and making scenes that horrify Mei and cause her classmates to laugh at her. Suddenly, Mei starts receiving the embarrassing and frightening matrilineal blessing of turning into a giant red panda, and the pressure to exorcise the panda comes at direct odds with Mei's friendships and interests.
The film is about a lot and the panda stands for multiple things. It's Mei's period and puberty. It's Mei's inner self, the things she wishes she could say to her repressive mother. It's Mei's dark side, her interests...It's Mei's mess. There's a strong theme of emotional abuse as Mei feels forced to hide the things she likes to avoid displeasing her mother, and even feels pressure to be untrue to herself around the people she loves. We also see the roots of that. There's also a theme of cultural conflict that forms these harmful dynamics, with the subtext that Mei's new interests break with Chinese standards of propriety and tradition. The film is respectable in its depiction of the struggle. Nobody is evil and nobody's path is evil...but the conflict is poison. I admire the things it brings up in discussion and it feels layered and thought-provoking.
The film's got tons of charm as well. Shi's stylization continues to break from the Pixar mold, and the directing and editing in particular emphasize it, as the film has frequent anime-style dramatic takes and visual effects. The colors are gorgeous and the staging of several scenes is really wonderful. The way the film dips into traditional Chinese artwork is also great, and the ancestor character's 3D appearance has some fascinatingly ethereal animation. The early 2000s setting also works pretty nicely. Also how did they animate that fur like that holy crap
Turning Red is a very personal story about family pressure and clashing cultural norms but it's also a wider-reaching story about generational abuse and finding your identity while dealing with the struggles of growing up. It's also a very fun watch.
WesternAnimation A fun movie overshadowed by a cliched mom
I was really looking forward to Turning Red — more than Luca, more than Encanto, this was the 2021-2022 Disney/Pixar animated film I was eager for. Chalk it up to cultural curiosity, as I wanted to see what an animated movie helmed by an all-female team and a Chinese-Canadian writer could bring to the table.
For the most part, Turning Red delivered what I wanted, as this is a movie that feels like it authentically captures the "tween girl" experience. Mei and her friends feel like real people, and I sympathized with their early discovery of cute boys and young love, rooted for them to succeed and despaired when they fell. Sure, the movie doesn't pull any shocking swerves or surprise twists, but the film doesn't need any such gimmicks to be entertaining.
However, the one thing that keeps Turning Red from true greatness is the unavoidable presence of Mei's mom, Ming. It's one thing to depict a Control Freak Obnoxious Entitled Housewife Abusive Mom, but Ming is Flanderized past the breaking point where she shatters into an unrealistic neurotic Cliché Storm of bad parenting. Worse, the movie depends on this depiction to work at all — much of the film's events wouldn't happen if Ming wasn't juggling the Idiot Ball, Poor Communication Kills, Evil Matriarch, Irrational Hatred, and a dozen other negative tropes at the same time. The movie tries to justify this with a Freudian Excuse about emotionally restrictive moms, but even that doesn't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny (Why is Ming so shocked that her daughter might be interested in boys, when she herself rebelled against Grandma Wu over her love of Jin? Was Ming expecting Mei to stay chaste and asexual until she turned 21?). The end result is that Ming doesn't feel like a character at all, but a walking pile of negative "Asian mom" stereotypes to move the plot forward.
While Turning Red is far from the worst movie ever produced by Pixar, it is a disappointment. I know that Domee Shi drew a lot of the story from her own experiences growing up, so I'd love to sit down with her and talk about just what kind of a childhood she had...
WesternAnimation Big Red, Turning Blue
Turning Red, the 25th Pixar movie, is about a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl Mei who learns she's descended from a line of women who Hulk Out into a giant red panda whenever they turn highly emotional. Her strict mother Ming decides to have the transformation suppressed via a time-specific ritual, while also putting further restrictions on her daughter in the meantime. Having a loving but oft-overbearing Asian mother, I can't help but feel Turning Red was partly made for me. And I liked much of it; the film boasts impressive animation, colorful characters, well-landed jokes, heavy themes and the expected hit-in-the-feels moment at the climax.
But I also left with a jittery feeling that something's wrong.
Much of the film follows Mei's life in middle school. While trying to deal with her erratic transformations, Mei plans to attend a Boy Band concert behind her mother's back. As someone with sisters who were once boy band-inclined, we shared some great nostalgic laughs watching this together. But Mei feels somewhat limited as a protagonist. She doesn't have to make any personal sacrifices or learn big lessons beyond accepting and asserting her feelings on what she wants. Which isn't necessarily bad, but I fear the movie didn't handle this in a healthy manner. Mei makes careless choices like lying to her family, selling out her friends, and even throttling another kid, but she's soon forgiven and gets basically everything she wants.
In part, this is because most of the conflict is Ming's fault. She's irrationally expecting, she publicly embarasses her daughter, and she turns into a rampaging panda kaiju. But it's revealed Ming became strict because she accidentally hurt her mother with the panda form in a past fight over the latter's disapproval of Mei's father. After her kaiju rampage, Ming apologizes and bows to Mei's wishes. This resolution doesn't feel earned. Ming flips from literally fighting with Mei verbally and physically to acquiescence, and there's little process to it aside from Ming's mother expressing forgiveness. I think it would have been more believable and affecting if Ming had more direct and personal observation of how her harsh behavior was harming Mei, and how Mei is better off without it.
There's also other aspects worth considering. The denouement adds a reference to a common pro-choice slogan ("my panda, my choice"). And while I don't think Ming's "Asian Mom" portrayal is outright offensive, I am a bit weary of Hollywood's shallow and repetitive Asian rep.
Turning Red has a lot of parts I enjoyed and related to, but the interpersonal conflict at its core didn't quite stick the landing. If you seek a Pixar film about an overbearing parent that goes through a gradual, believable arc of accepting their child's freedom whilst the child grows more bold, assertive and independent, check out Finding Nemo. It handles similar themes much better.