I can’t tell you exactly when it happened, but somewhere around middle school, I ended up obsessed with red pandas. The early childhood phase was dinosaurs. Somewhere along the way, I discovered red pandas and latched on. Fast forward and move along to non-animal-related things. I’m a high-schooler struggling to define myself outside of the external and internalized pressures for achievement. Anxiety about letting my parents down, never figuring out who I should be, and existential dread about failing runs rampant. I bring up these two seemingly unrelated things because in her new Pixar movie Turning Red (2022), writer-director Domee Shi brings those two disparate aspects together into one marvelous story about a girl’s quest to find herself.
The girl in question is 13-year-old Mei Lee (Rosalie Chiang). She lives in Toronto, Ontario with her parents Ming (Sandra Oh) and Jin (Orion Lee). Together, they care for a temple devoted to family ancestor Sun Lee, a devotion that doubles a business. When she’s not with her parents, Mei navigates the trials of middle school with her fiercely loyal best friends Meriam (Ava Morse), Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), and Abby (Hyein Park). Among other things, the friends are united by their devotion to the boy band 4*Town. Amidst this, Mei struggles with Ming’s overbearing nature. It reaches a fever pitch when Ming embarrasses Mei in front of her classmates. Shortly thereafter, Mei discovers a new wrinkle; when she has a major emotion of any kind, she turns into a giant red panda.
Shi made her Pixar directorial debut with the inspired short film Bao (2018). In a handful of minutes, Bao uses a dumpling metaphor to explore the difficulty a mother has in letting go of her son. Tracing that short to this feature, it’s easy to identify Shi’s interest in examining how maturation impacts parent-child relationships. Whereas Bao focused on the parental view, Turning Red commits to the child end of that equation, placing us firmly in Mei’s journey to puzzle out who she is and what that means for her and Ming. It is a pungent theme, one that speaks to the unifying experience of growing up and working desperately to separate from the image your parents had of you. What makes Turning Red sing though is the vibrant specificity that Shi brings to the aesthetics and the narrative that she co-wrote with Julia Cho.
Mei is essential to that specificity. She is dazzlingly goofy alongside being the empathetic center of the film. Mei is a straight-A student. She rocks out on the flute and choreographs karaoke routines. She is also a ticking time bomb of nerves recognizable by all of us who went through adolescence defined by over-achieving. On the morning that she discovers her furry situation, she reacts the way any high-strung teenager should; she freaks out. After she stumbles into the bathroom, avoids Ming, and dashes back to her room, she realizes that if she forces herself to be calm she can become human again. I point this out because it gets to the heart of what it’s like to manage stress as a teenager. You feel like a freak, and breathing through it can seem as impossible or improbable as shapeshifting.
Crucially though, Shi and Cho never over navigate into the more draining emotions. They are present and vital, but much like previous Pixar standout Inside Out (2015), Turning Red also manages to be utterly hilarious and heartwarming. Led by Chiang’s hysterical take on Mei, the voice cast helps achieve much of this. She especially shines when united with Morse, Ramakrishnan, and Park. Their friend group represents the absolute best of growing up when you find your people and they watch out for you no matter what. Even if, in this case, you happen to turn into a giant red panda. Through a combination of performance and deft sound design, their scenes flow the way best friends do. They talk over and into one another, chirping out inside jokes with ease and panache. I had a giant grin plastered on my face every time they assembled.
Flowing through all of this is Shi and her animators’ masterful work. There is a certain norm to the Pixar movies animation style. While it is present as the baseline here, Shi and her team take utter glee in blowing it up. Incorporating nods to anime, action movies, Godzilla, and even an almost-horror (by Disney standards) dream sequence. Such an approach only solidifies the film’s lovely blend of lightness and heady grappling with emotional topics. The animation reflects a teenager grasping around at everything that might work for her. Her journey refracts through a kaleidoscopic and enlivening directorial approach. It’s especially exciting to see this in a Pixar-backed film. Maybe, just maybe, they are growing more open to letting visionary filmmakers like Shi blow up the rule book.
I sobbed near the end of Turning Red more than I have at any Pixar release, the studio possibly best equipped to make adults cry, since Inside Out (2015). I also belly-laughed throughout. Turning Red connects on these fervent emotional levels because Shi and her team imbue it with a remarkable level of empathy and humanity. Yes, I may be one of the perfect audience targets for this movie. Yet, you don’t have to harbor a long-gestating obsession with red pandas to be absolutely floored by the storytelling. We have all grown up, all rebelled, and wished with all our soul to be understood. Mei is, in that way, all of us, just as much as she is unequivocally herself.
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Devin McGrath-Conwell holds a B.A. in Film / English from Middlebury College and is currently pursuing an MFA in Screenwriting from Emerson College. His obsessions include all things horror, David Lynch, the darkest of satires, and Billy Joel. Devin’s writing has also appeared in publications such as Filmhounds Magazine, Film Cred, Horror Homeroom, and Cinema Scholars.