Turning Red

After decades of cultural appropriation and racial caricature that ranged from mildly awkward to deeply offensive, followed by bumbling overcorrections into shameless tokenism and questionable virtue signalling, Disney Animation seems to have turned a corner. Films like the sublime Moana, the spectacular Coco, and even the middling Encanto successfully combined Disney’s trusty European folktale structures with cultures whose traditions would seem in direct contrast to their distinctly Western narrative and thematic templates. Meanwhile, Pixar Animation Studios has proven time and time again that they can make box office smashes out of unusual premises that seem like tough sells, like WALL-E, Up, and Inside Out, while also managing to touch the hearts and tickle the minds of even the most cynical cinephiles. So my hopes were high for the latest Disney/Pixar production, Turning Red, which tries to double down on both studios' recent achievements, and it tries so hard that it’s downright painful to sit through.

Turning Red centers on a Canadian-born child of Chinese immigrants living in 2002 Toronto. That setting feels fresh and distinctive, especially for an animated feature. Thirteen-year-old Meilin "Mei" Lee (voiced by newcomer Rosalie Chiang) is an upbeat, well-adjusted girl who lives with her parents, Ming and Jin. She and her school friends are obsessed with pop culture, especially a boy band called 4*Town, but Mei also enjoys working with her parents at the family business, a temple dedicated to the memory of their ancestor Sun Yee that’s also a local tourist attraction. Ming (Sandra Oh) is strict, so their relationship is fraught, but Mei is eager to be a dutiful daughter and make her folks proud.

she pandas out, the other kids think her Hulk-like transformations are cool. It’s basically what happens to Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf. But all of this causes a rift in her family, especially with her mother, who believes that giving in to the panda can be dangerous and destructive.

This is a great premise, and the fact that Walt Disney Pictures made a big-budget coming-of-age movie that’s a not-even-thinly-veiled menstruation parable is reason enough to celebrate it conceptually. If this movie came out as a low-budget, live-action indie in 1995, alongside Welcome to the Dollhouse, Heavy, Party Girl, Tank Girl, and The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love, I bet I would have dug it (and I'd probably have especially dug how they handled the panda transformation). But as a contemporary animated feature, I found it beyond frustrating.

First and foremost, Turning Red is yet another relentlessly paced, hyperkinetic barrage of over-animated, rapidly cut visuals accompanied by oppressively loud sound design. The camera does not stop moving and the characters do not stop talking. Nothing comes to rest for more than a few seconds in this picture. Even when Mei runs up to her room to cry alone in her bed, she only gets a few good sobs in before someone's at her window, or her mom knocks on the door, or she realizes she forgot to do something of vital importance and must rush off to take care of it. Like the dreadful non-Disney animated hit from the previous year, The Mitchells vs the Machines, this film's accelerator pedal is floored for its entire duration. As a result, Mei's world feels just as exaggerated and intense before she starts turning into the panda as it does after.

Layered on top of the assault of visuals is an onslaught of dialogue. There has been a welcome trend recently where kid’s movies have started to trust that young audiences can comprehend information on their own without having every situation explained and every theme telegraphed or spelled out for them. But perhaps in this case, the filmmakers and studio felt their premise was so extreme or centered on such potentially controversial subject matter that they had better err on the side of making sure no one misunderstood anything. But this seems wrongheaded for a movie about how difficult it is to fathom and sort out the changes one undergoes when hitting puberty.

Turning Red is clearly a personal story. Domee Shi, the thirty-three-year-old director of Pixar’s 2019 Best Animated Short Film Bao, is, like her protagonist, a Chinese immigrant who grew up in Toronto and had a close relationship with her overprotective mother. I'm sure many of the details that enrich this screenplay have their roots in her life experience, but the movie as a whole feels like it's been examined, processed, smoothed over, and approved by a dozen corporate committees. This is not to say Disney’s use of consultants to advise on their features as they're developed is always a bad thing. I'm sure the psychologists who advised Inside Out’s filmmakers kept them from oversimplifying or making things too complicated when depicting anthropomorphized emotions inside a child's brain. And I know from countless interviews that the cultural consultants on Coco were instrumental at a key stage in Coco’s development, explaining to the story team that you simply can't make a movie about the Mexican tradition of the Day of the Dead that adheres to the American concept of "finding closure" and "moving on after an appropriate time of mourning the loss of a loved one." The lengthy processes those films underwent with their teams of consultants resulted in making the character of Sadness into a hero in Inside Out, and the creation of the terrific "Remember Me," song that underscores the musical and thematic resonance of Coco.

By contrast, Turning Red feels engineered by a committee when it should feel deeply personal. There’s a specificity to this tale that probably scared off the bean counters, resulting in a movie that tries for a more universal appeal, making the distinctive Mei into more of an everygirl who just wants to have fun and break free of parental constraints. I think if it had leaned more into what makes her feel different and “othered”—emotions all of us have experienced, at least to some degree—it might have actually been more relatable, and at the very least, more interesting.

More problems: throughout the film, Mei seems to have the perspective of someone distinctly older than an early teenager. Her character narrates the movie in the present tense, so it’s not that she’s not looking back on her childhood with newfound wisdom or perspective. I’m unsure why the movie is set in 2002 instead of 2022; to feature the NSYNC style boy-band, perhaps? Maybe it’s so the film doesn’t need to deal with social media. But, this is a movie made for kids of this era, where social media is a huge factor in adolescent life. But that choice to set the film twenty years ago feels like it’s servicing a thirty-five-year-old audience rather than teen and pre-teen viewers. And whatever the reason for the early-Aughts setting, the film doesn’t commit to it; the teenage characters use lingo and terminology that just didn’t exist twenty years ago, and there’s even a scene in which Mei shocks her mother by twerking like Miley Cyrus at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards - which, it goes without saying, would have been baffling to all of these characters in 2002.

Even worse, the movie misses its opportunity to fully explore and develop its central metaphor. When Mei first transforms into the panda, she freaks out: suddenly she's hairy, she smells bad, and her body no longer fits into spaces that used to suit her well. ”Wow,” I thought, “they're really doing this!” That lasted all of two minutes, because not a single one of Mei’s friends reject her or have any difficulty with the new entity she's become for even a moment. They all love her unconditionally, and immediately start to brainstorm ways to monetize her new special power so they can afford to go see the 4*Town concert. All of their plans work perfectly. She winds up becoming one of the most popular kids in school. Even the bully wants in on the panda action. It feel like what thirty-year-old filmmakers might have wanted their childhood to be, rather than how it actually was.

What it doesn’t feel is honest. Peer issues and the biological complications of life aren’t problems for Mei. She lives in a world where all kids support each other. What stands in the way of her goals and ability to self-actualize is her autocratic mother. Even a later plot point in which Mei betrays her friends is painted as being her mother's fault more than hers. And the reasons Ming is so overprotective are because of her own issues, not anything Mei has done. In the end, it is up to Mei to help Ming heal the rift Ming experienced with her own mother…though not before Ming unleashes her own inner panda, a Godzilla-sized monster capable of destroying all of Toronto.

Granted, a kaiju parent who not only embarrasses the teenage protagonist by crashing the concert she's snuck out to, but also threatens to destroy the concert arena while doing so, is a great visual manifestation of the mortification many kids feel about the ways their parents show up in their lives. Containing this monster, however, is a clumsy metaphor for intergenerational discord. It feels more aspirational than truthful. Plus, for an old narrative fart like me, it's extra frustrating that the person who must change in this story is not the main character, but the main character's mother. Turning Red is a vivid example of a trend I call "apology porn," films whose climaxes involve a parent telling their child that they are sorry for all the terrible things they did wrong when raising them. Other recent animated examples include Encanto and The Mitchells vs. the Machines. The live-action 2022 smash hit Everything Everywhere All At Once also belongs to this unfortunate genre, though at least in that film the mother is the protagonist, so it makes much more sense for her character to realize that she has caused harm to her daughter.

It's not surprising that most of these movies are created principally by Millennials, the first generation of Americans to have a worse standard of living than their parents. It isn’t that I don't think the age group below my own doesn't have a right to be pissed; I just don't resonate with the answers many of them are infusing into their art. This is a generation that firmly rejected the idea of the "happily ever after" ending as a lie and a false promise. But I think they have merely replaced that simplistic fantasy with one that’s equally erroneous. Simply getting that hug from your dad or mea culpa from your mom doesn't actually heal your differences with them, or break the long-standing cycle of cross-generational mistreatment. Just as a movie that ends with the hero riding off into the sunset with the handsome prince or princess feels hollow to those who wonder what happens the next day, the forgiveness hug that comes at the end of most of these movies doesn't magically wipe away all the poisonous parenting or lingering damage done during one's childhood and adolescence. The Millennial generation was quick to accept the idea that "you can't change people" when it comes to toxic romantic relationships, but somehow they also seem to think not only that you can change toxic parental relationships, but that you need to. Moreover, the apologies found in apology porn have less to do with a simple acknowledgement of harm done; they present or imply the fantasy of a parent’s total and unconditional acceptance of the young person, who is often painted as far more developed, enlightened, and truthful than those who reared them.

Maybe it’s just that I’m a cranky old Gen-Xer, and an over-privileged straight cis-gendered male white one from, to top it all off, Boston—a city not exactly known for its compassion and tolerance. Many of the films I disparage as apology porn are told from an immigrant or child of immigrants' perspective, and many are overtly queer or thematically queer-coded. But I'm as much a product of the LGBT and immigrant cinematic narratives I grew up with as I am of the movies of Stephen Spielberg or John Hughes. And the subtext of so many of the films that formed my generation proposed that it was foolish to expect your parents to fully understand and accept you for who you were. Films like My Beautiful Laundrette, Parting Glances, and Home for the Holidays posited that becoming part of a "chosen family" was not only going to be the place you'd find more genuine acceptance than at home, it was where you'd discover authentic understanding, and a more honest form of unconditional love.

I still think that message is a more truthful one to put out in the world. If nothing else, it makes you the protagonist of your own story in a way that doesn’t require you to have the superpower ability to rewrite the attitudes and behaviors of the community you were born into. But it does empower you, though in a far more mundane and non-genre-movie fantasy way, to change where you look for acceptance, love, empowerment, and a sense of self.

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