Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Pixar’s latest sees us following 13 year old Chinese-Canadian “Mei” Lee, voice by Rosalie Chiang, an energetic, high-achieving kid striving to do her best and to not disappoint her ancestors, be those historical or immediate, namely her mother, Sandra Oh’s Ming Lee, who is part mother, part helicopter, seemingly far too protective of her child.
Some of the rationale for this becomes apparent when one day the little girl turns into something else. Not a woman, necessarily, as the title’s tilt at menstruation hints, but a panda. A giant red panda. uwu.
Whenever strong emotions hit, the women of Mei’s family will turn into an unusually large red panda in order, as her mother later explains, to protect their family, all the way back to their venerated ancestor Sun Yee, and all of a sudden the temple the family maintain to her makes a bit more sense. This process can be stopped, with a ritual performed at the next red moon, a month or so from now.
Mei believes she’s able to control her emotions and goes back to normal school life, and returns to dreaming about making it to the upcoming teen-bop group 4*Town’s concert along with her supportive friend group. If only they could raise some money to afford the tickets, perhaps by exploiting some supernatural gifts. What could go wrong?
Actually, surprisingly little, at least in a strictly physical sense, until her actions cause Mei’s mother to flip her lid, loose her cool and unleash massive red-panda based destruction upon Toronto.
I think you could make a case that the final act panda-kaiju tomfoolery is a bridge too far, a decidedly un-subtle escalation of already established symbolism that doesn’t add all that much to the film apart from giving it a rather more traditional concluding structure, and it was doing well enough with the battles being more internal in nature, destroying emotions rather than stadiums.
But maybe I’m being a grouch, as I’d argue that this is the best thing Pixar’s done since Coco. Not as good, in my opinion, but there’s maybe a bit of personal bias towards the setting of Coco that would swing the other way for the Asian community. At any rate, Turning Red is well worth watching regardless of your ethnicity.
It looks really nice, table stakes for Pixar perhaps, but this is a nice blend of what I might call their house style with a touch of Ghibli influence, and more importantly Mei feels like a believable and relatable character, well, transmogrification aside, and the relationships with her family and friend group similarly feel real. It’s actually one of the very few North American films I seen with a school dynamic that seems relatable, rather than an adaptation of Lord of the Flies.
In short, a lot to like, very little if anything to dislike. It’s the Moviewatch recommendation of the week.