Turning Red (2022)

Score: 3 / 5

Disney's last few movies haven't quite done much for me, and the latest -- in conjunction with Pixar -- pretty much follows suit. Turning Red features a breakneck screenplay that has a lot going for it. Fiercely intelligent, it concerns the coming of age of a girl in a world she is still learning to navigate. Added to Meilin's (Rosalie Chiang) journey are elements, yes, of age and gender, but also of class and race. Her Chinese-Canadian family lives in Toronto and she helps her mother Ming (Sandra Oh) run a sacred temple for their ancestors; their family has a mystical connection with red pandas. She's also a bit of a geek at school, annoyingly involved in everything and not shy about her widespread interests. Most importantly, Mei is becoming a woman at the time this film gets going, and so in multiple ways she is indeed "turning red."

I wasn't ready cognitively for an animated Disney movie to so pointedly tackle menstruation and puberty in girls, but I quickly hopped on board. The film fabulously courts audiences into its candy-colored world at a breakneck pace, one seemingly designed for Gen Z viewership due to its frenetic energy. Blink and you'll miss crucial plot and character details. There are pointed scenes about the awkwardness of engaging your mother about your changing body; she repeatedly checks if Mei needs a tampon, even in public. Mei's burgeoning interest in boys -- she is 13, so take that for what it's worth -- is perhaps the most obvious point of the film, and causes no small amount of stress for her (she should be focusing on schoolwork, work, and her tight friend group) and her mother (as a proper mother from eastern Asia, her standards and expectations for Mei's success are almost unattainable).

POOF. After a particularly embarrassing moment in which Mei's mother shames the store clerk after whom she's pining, Mei's overwhelming emotions transform her into a giant red panda. Obviously this plays off the western werewolf myth -- or for Gen Z audiences, the Incredible Hulk story -- but it's clever culturally and symbolically. Turning into animals in times of need or stress is a common trope; less common is using the animal to describe and symbolize real issues, such as new body hair, new body type, and new colors that could be alarming to an impressionable youngster. Mei's panic at seeing herself soon changes to more existential questions of identity. How can she fit in if she's prone to poofing in a cloud of red smoke and fur?

The film actively embraces the identity of Mei, and everything from the animation style to the editing speaks to forcing us into her world. It's a hormonal roller coaster mixed with a style not unlike anime. That's, frankly, why I don't much like the film, but I understand that the popular aesthetic will appeal to many other viewers than myself. Sudden tight zooms on faces, cartoonish and exaggerated expressions (like the glistening wide eyes of...hope? Starstruck awe?), and backgrounds that suddenly look like the backdrop of a comic book when a superhero materializes. These moments and many more make the film feel like something in an anime, which is just a style I don't enjoy.

I also think it's a profound disservice that this film went straight to streaming. Disney films will always do well in the box office, and Disney+ is clearly doing just fine for itself, so it's annoying to me that they are releasing feature films there (such as Soul). Maybe some of the more experimental or risky ones (the live action Lady and the Tramp that I refuse to watch because those beasts are nightmare fuel), sure, but not original, reliable animated features. It feels weird to me that Luca, the first ostensibly queer drama from the studio, was released this way, and now that the most aggressively and intelligently feminist Disney movie in ages (other than Raya and the Last Dragon and Frozen II), one has to wonder why Disney is playing it safe in cinemas. I mean, Ming literally asks her daughter at one point "Has the red peony blossomed?" and even though it was meant as a cringey joke by the writers, it caught me offguard and I got a bit emotional about it. Perhaps residual concerns about the pandemic's effect on ticket sales is why they're just streaming it, but it's telling that Disney is still releasing half their output in theaters.

In terms of the film itself, I'm not sure what else to say. We could talk about the universality of Mei's story paired with the incredibly realized specificity of her culture and society. There are conversations to be had about first and second generation immigrants, about how this story encourages synthesis between tradition and novelty, about working class families and inner city youth. We could psychoanalyze the panda, the girls coming of age, the mother. We could talk about Mei's loving father and the objectification of boys. We can even praise Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell for their musical input vis-a-vis 4-Town, the boy band (with five members) for whom the girls all swoon. Perhaps most interesting to me is the film's intense concern over generational curses, and how Mei connects with her ancestors over the seeming curse of the family women turning into monsters (even when Ming, too, turns, it's a shocking moment of, shall we say, kaiju proportions). But ultimately, it's a cute romp through feminist territory that normalizes stories of immigrant families, and it's really wonderful. I just personally wish it was presented in a different format aesthetically.