Turning Red

Like the best films to come out of the Pixar Studio, Turning Red is a movie that mixes emotion and real life experiences with the fantastic that only the animated film medium can provide.  Making her feature directing debut, Domee Shi was greatly inspired by her own experiences of being 13-years-old in the early 2000s, as well as the Japanese Anime that she used to watch regularly, to create a heartwarming and funny story that covers some pretty tricky coming of age issues for an animated family comedy, as well as adding some heartwarming notes about family and mothers and daughters in the mix.

When we meet heroine Mei Lee (voiced by a likable Rosalie Chiang), she breaks the fourth wall and introduces herself to us, as well as her world as a tween girl living in the Chinatown area of Toronto.  As she speaks and introduces us to her friends, family, and daily routine, we get the sense that Shi is drawing on a lot of herself in this intro.  The city, usual hang outs, and characters we're introduced to all feel lived in and real.  Mei is an overachiever whose life is built around grades, helping her mother (Sandra Oh) run the family temple, and joining her trio of best girlfriends as they gossip about the other kids at school, and dream about their favorite boyband music group, 4*Town.  Mei has just turned 13, and is beginning to be more interested in guys, such as the 17-year-old boy who works at the local convenience store.  She finds herself fighting urges to break from studying in order to draw little cartoons on the edges of her notebook of her "forbidden" desires.

This is hard when her mom is a combination of a helicopter parent, who wants to be involved in every aspect of her daughter's life, and a "Tiger Mom" who will fiercely protect her at all costs from any distraction, including her friends.  Mei is starting to reach that age where she still wants to please her mom and live up to her expectations, while also wanting to explore her own desires and wishes so that she can become the woman she wants to eventually be.  It becomes especially hard for Mei when she finds out about an ancient family secret that was started by a great ancestor, and has been passed down to the women in her family.  When they come of age, the women become red pandas with any extreme emotion that they might feel.  And with Mei being a hormonal girl going through a lot of changes, the panda has started to come out.

Mei can control the panda by controlling her emotions, which is hard enough as it is, let alone when you're 13 with overprotective parents who don't understand you.  There's a ceremony that can be performed that can lock the panda away, and Mei can go back to being a normal girl.  But, does she want to be what her mother sees her as?  Turning Red is frank in how it handles the tricky subject matter of puberty, and yes, menstruation, which are brought up throughout the film.  But nervous parents need not worry that it will suddenly inspire some very hard questions from young kids who are not ready to know about it.  The film is first and foremost a relatable fantasy about a girl trying to find her place in her own world.  It simply is brave enough to also handle some obvious issues in a mature way that will likely fly over the youngest viewers.

Most of all, the film is about Mei and her three best friends, Miriam (Ava Morse), Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), and Abby (Hyein Park).  They accept her completely, and even help her come to terms with the Panda, becoming the catalyst to controlling it.  However, her mother does not approve of them, because they are so different from what she perceives a "perfect" daughter should be.  So, Mei finds herself frequently caught between pleasing her mother, and being herself in front of her friends, who want her to cut loose a little and go singing with them, instead of cleaning the family temple after school.  This too is handled with a great amount of maturity and humor, and helps further ground the story in a kind of reality.  As much as the film is about a young girl struggling to control a literal beast that is within her, it's about life experiences that the filmmakers obviously drew on, and have a deep respect for.

That's what makes Turning Red stand out.  There is so much identity and truth to the characters and what the film is saying.  Even if you never had the exact real world experiences, you can still relate to it and sense its accuracy.  The film is also a visual wonder, so much so that it's a crying shame it's getting placed on streaming, instead of the theatrical release it was meant for.  I understand that Studios are struggling to get people back to theaters for movies that don't involve capes or superpowers, but there is just as much a need to watch animation like this on the big screen.  We need diverse genres at the cinema now more than ever, and I truly hope that the theater never becomes a permanent home only for "event" movies.

That bit aside, here is a movie that is as magical, truthful, and funny as anything Pixar has done, and serves as a wonderful directing debut for Shi, who I'm sure has many more stories and personal experiences to share, and I eagerly await them.

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