‘Turning Red’ pandas to a wide audience
Recently a reviewer for the online movie site CinemaBlend caused outrage when he wrote a review of the new Pixar animation Turning Red, dismissing it as too narrowly focused on the Toronto Asian community and feeling as if director Domee Shi had made the film for her “friends and immediate family members, which is fine — but also a tad limiting in its scope”.
Outraged fans accused the site of racism and sexism, pressuring it to withdraw the review and apologise. It turns out that the reviewer in question was indeed an ass because, while it’s certainly set within the Asian community of Toronto in the early 2000s and is keenly attuned to the quirks and eccentricities of that community and period, Shi’s assured film is anything but narrow in its focus.
Like the best of Pixar’s zeitgeistchannelling animations, Turning Red is constantly surprising, visually inventive and packed with plenty of sly jokes for both young and older viewers alike.
It’s the story of Meilin Lee (Rosalie Chiang), a seemingly typical immigrant teenager who’s a dedicated overachiever at school, where she and her gang of girlfriends share an obsession with a boy band; and a devoted daughter at home where she helps give tours of the Chinese temple next door, which her parents run. Meilin’s mother Ming (Sandra Oh) is on the surface the epitome of a “tiger mother ”— strict and shamelessly involved in every aspect of her daughter’s life.
One morning Meilin wakes up to find that the embarrassment of a particular cringey incident involving her mother has turned her into a big, fluffy, red panda.
But, thankfully, the red panda is not a tacky metaphor for a young girl entering puberty but rather one that asks bigger questions about how we often repress aspects of our personalities for the sake of keeping up appearances and at the expense of our personal growth and development.
Beautifully and energetically animated, Turning Red is ultimately a refreshing, smart and confident new entry into the animation universe. ‘Turning Red’ is on circuit.