Reviews WesternAnimation / Turning Red

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.