PANDAMONIUM
SANDRA OH TALKS TO LAUREN TAYLOR ABOUT THE CONFUSION OF PUBERTY AND THE MESSINESS OF TEENAGE YEARS, AS CAPTURED IN PIXAR’S MOVIE TURNING RED
IT IS not easy being a 13-year-old girl – the highs and lows, the emotions you can’t process, and the push and pull between wanting to be a grown-up and still feeling like a child.
Sandra Oh’s new Disney and Pixar film, Turning Red, tackles this rollercoaster time of life.
The Killing Eve star voices Ming, the overprotective mother of straight-A student Meilin ‘Mei’ Lee who inherits a ‘genetic quirk’ that sees her turn into a giant red panda whenever she feels strong emotions.
Think the Incredible Hulk – only more adorable. Fluffy, eight feet tall, smelly and unpredictable, causing accidental destruction wherever she goes, the sudden, embarrassing metamorphosis is exactly what teenager Mei doesn’t need as she tries to navigate school, boys and her family.
“For me, clearly it means puberty,” Sandra, 50, says of the red panda metaphor. “It also means change, it also means messiness. But it means your actual power [too]. Mei as a panda – fantastic! What an entrepreneur she is!
“It can also be a beast when you are trying to figure out your strong feelings.”
Set in early Noughties Toronto, the animated film follows ChineseCanadian Mei (voiced by newcomer Rosalie Chiang) who is confident and over-achieving at school, and obedient at home – looking after the family’s ancestral temple.
The straining, complex relationship with Sandra’s character – stubborn, funny and always elegantly turned out – is central to the story in this coming-of-age tale. Despite not being a mother herself, Sandra says: “[I was] able to still bring my own perspective into what it is to be hyper-vigilant and to care and potentially want to overprotect something you love very much.”
The film is for parents as much as young people, she says: “When you’re 13, your parents can be the bad people”, teenagers have to “fight against something. When you pass that time and you either become a parent or the age of a parent, then you realise where they were coming from in the first place.”
Turning Red producer Lindsey Collins – mum to two teenage daughters and a teenage son – can relate. “Definitely [with my] daughters, emotionally we can trigger each other a lot more than my son does,” she says. “I think [we] project a lot more on to daughters and vice versa. “I think it’s an age we all kind of try to forget. Viscerally, they’re very clear memories for most of us. We’re always like, ‘Oh, God, the embarrassment!”’
Rosalie, who says it was “a magical moment” learning she’d landed a Pixar role, was first booked to do temporary recordings for the film’s early development at the age of 12 – so the character felt really relatable.
“Mei has a lot of odd similarities with me. I was able to understand her motivations, why she’s saying what she’s saying, and her beliefs and all that,” she says.
After two years, they were ready to cast the lead role. “We listened to a lot of auditions but we’d already fallen in love with Rosalie,” says Lindsey. “She’s super close to her mum, she was home-schooled and an A-student – in many ways she’s just like Mei. Her genuine, unrehearsed, authentic performance breathed such life into Mei.”
In true Noughties teen-style, Mei and her close group of friends are obsessed with boyband 4*Town. Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell wrote the band’s songs – which sound so unmistakably Noughties you’ll swear you’ve heard them before.
“It was so funny, we’d play them, and people would be like, ‘Oh my God, I remember that song’. And you’re like, ‘No, you don’t. It’s a brand-new song!’ says Lindsey.
“Billie and Finneas did such an amazing job... they loved that era and they love boybands. They were so great at delivering these perfect kind of early 2000s boyband songs that sound as though you’ve known them for 20 years.”
Director Domee Shi adds: “Boybands were the first step into the world of boys for a lot of girls that age. The guys were all super pretty, polished, soft and loving, and they had a way of bringing girls and their besties together. Plus, I thought it’d be really cool to create an animated boyband.”
The experience of being a child of immigrant parents is something that resonated with Domee particularly. “Mei, in the movie, is in a lot of ways similar to me when I was growing up as an awkward 13-yearold Chinese-Canadian girl in Toronto, Canada, in the early 2000s.
“I think Mei’s struggle with trying to balance honouring her parents and honouring herself, and, on top of that, dealing with puberty with all of these bodily changes that are happening to her... I think that was very much something that I struggled with, and a lot of immigrant kids and Asian kids struggled with,” Domee says. She’s growing up in a very different world than her parents grew up in. And [there’s] that struggle and that not black and white answer to the question of who do you honour? Who do you want to be?”
The colourful, bold style is animeinspired – Domee grew up watching anime and says it felt perfect for a film about an adolescent girl on an emotional rollercoaster.
“When audiences watch it, I hope that they are invited to embrace their own inner pandas, so to speak,” she says. “Which means embrace that inner messy side of yourself, the messiness of life, the messiness of relationships, and just be OK with the grey areas, with the imperfections, like Mei does in the movie.”
When audiences watch it, I hope they are invited to embrace their inner pandas, so to speak Director Domee Shi
Turning Red streams on Disney+ from Friday