The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
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‘Turning Red’ is one of Pixar’s best ever films – and, in tackling menstruation, its bravest. So why has it been pulled from cinemas?
A little over four years ago, Domee Shi was summoned by Bob Iger, Disney’s then-chief executive, to explain exactly how she was planning to spend around $200 million of the company’s cash. This would be a daunting moment for any aspiring film-maker at Pixar, but it was triply so for Shi, a then-30-year-old relative newcomer who was about to become the first woman to singlehandedly direct one of the studio’s features – and whose big idea was considerably more risqué than talking toys.
Her proposal centred on Meilin Lee, a 13-year-old growing up in early-noughties Toronto, who wakes one morning to find that at moments of high emotion she now transforms into a giant red panda. Mei’s coming to terms with her smelly, hairy, bulgy alter ego was, of course, a sly allegory for a teenage girl’s changes during adolescence. But rather than presenting it as such, with a subtle wink to older viewers, Shi was determined to get into the cringey specifics. This would be a film, she explained, that would break taboos around female puberty. There would be toecurlingly awkward mother-daughter conversations about menstruation – even, in a bold first for the medium, digitally animated sanitary pads.
“So,” Iger said after a pause. “It’s a period piece.”
And an unexpectedly timely one, at that. Turning Red, which launches on Disney+ next week in more or less exactly the form Shi originally pitched, isn’t just one of the most brilliant – and perhaps the most daring – of Pixar’s 25 features to date. Its tale of youthful turmoil is also curiously attuned to the revered animation house’s own current growing pains. When Shi joined Pixar in 2011 – initially on a threemonth graduate placement – their recent merger with Disney had led to a spell of creative cross-pollination. The home of Monsters Inc and WALL-E was putting the finishing touches to Brave, their own princess musical, while Disney Animation was doing the same to Wreck-It Ralph, a conspicuously Pixar-esque caper about a video-game baddie reconnecting with his sensitive side.
But 11 years on, the two studios’ paths have once again diverged. Under Frozen director Jennifer Lee, Disney Animation has gone big on beauty, spectacle and proven talent: think Encanto, with its Lin-Manuel Miranda musical numbers and Oscar-winning directorial pedigree, or the forthcoming Strange
World, about a family of explorers on a spectacular quest.
Meanwhile, Pixar, now led by Pete Docter, director of Inside Out and Up, has tacked towards more reflective, unorthodox stories – some from artists and animators who’d yet to be trusted with a feature of their own. Soul, Docter’s own most recent film, was about a middle-aged jazz pianist wrestling with life’s inherent meaninglessness. And like the two that followed it – the gentle beachside escapade Luca, and now Turning Red – it had its cinema release cancelled at the last minute, and was abruptly shunted onto the Disney+ streaming service instead.
Pixar’s next film, the Toy Story spin-off Lightyear, is widely expected to herald the studio’s return to cinemas this summer. But those three cancellations in 14 months – while Disney Animation’s Encanto opened in cinemas as planned – have naturally sparked speculation that internal politics were to blame.
The decision was made “at a company-wide, umbrella level”, explains Lindsey Collins, Turning Red’s producer and a Pixar veteran of 25 years, who’s in London with Shi ahead of their film’s worldwide launch. “And given where Covid was in January, it was just one of those things.
“When we found out, I asked Domee, ‘Are you bummed?’ Because this wasn’t something we had decided ourselves. But she had the healthiest perspective of all of us. She was like, ‘Well, the movies that meant the most to me growing up were the ones I could watch over and over again at home on VHS.’”
“That was the format that built all my fondest memories of animation,” Shi continues. “Just watching it at home, rewinding to my favourite parts, pausing and trying to sketch Aladdin’s beautiful face. But, yeah. I had mixed feelings.”
Iger, the Disney chief executive who had commissioned the film – and who once called the acquisition of Pixar his “proudest decision” – stepped down in early 2020, just before the international launch of Disney+. Did the late shift to streaming feel like a corporate rap on the knuckles from the new regime, who might look less kindly on creatively risky projects?
Shi looks pained. “It feels like, right now, films have to be seen as an event to be in cinemas,” she says. “But I have hope that all kinds of movies will still get to be seen in theatres. You just don’t know what the market or the future holds.” Shi’s own cinematic debut came in 2018, when her short film Bao – about a sentient dumpling who gets eaten by its overprotective mother – was picked by Docter to play before screenings of Incredibles 2.
“When I shared the idea with Pete, I didn’t even see the short being made at Pixar,” Shi recalls. “But he was always into the shocking ending – how different and quirky it was. He’s always been appreciative and supportive of all of us weird kids, maybe because he was a weird kid himself. I’m sure that Enrico [Casarosa, the director of Luca] feels the same way. It’s kind of great to have a champion in your corner when you’re pitching your stuff to, like, Disney.”
Towards the end of a decade in which almost two-thirds of Pixar’s films had been sequels, Bao was a welcome blast of originality and cheek, and seemed to herald the arrival of an exciting new voice.
This was all on Docter’s orders. Shi was one of a number of animators the newly promoted Pixar chief had earmarked as directors-in-waiting: Collins explains that the studio is currently in the process of getting “about six pretty exciting and impressive first-timers to the starting line” on features that have yet to be announced. Shi’s first job at the studio was on the Inside Out story team: she came up with the Imaginary Boyfriend Machine, which sits in Riley’s subconscious, pumping out tousle-haired Harry Styles lookalikes.
It was arguably the first notable flicker of human sexual attraction in a Pixar film – and in Turning Red, much more was to follow. When work began on the film, Shi and Collins assembled an all-female leadership team – a first in the traditionally male-dominated world of studio animation – which Collins says encouraged a frankness around the film’s intimate themes. Mei openly drools over her favourite boyband, 4*Town, and stashes amorous doodles of the teenage corner-shop assistant beneath her mattress.
“We just wanted to be as honest as possible about what a teenage girl goes through,” Shi says. “She gets her period and gets horribly embarrassed. She goes down lusty drawing spirals under her bed. She sweatily ogles and objectifies boys with her friends.” (Like Mei, Shi is a mid-noughties Toronto kid: she was born in Chongqing, in the southwest of China, and emigrated to Canada with her parents when she was two years old.) “And the fact we were able to just sit around, this group of women, trading stories about all of these things in this completely matter-of-fact way really helped.”
Would Turning Red have been possible with a mixed-sex core team? Collins is unsure. “Having been at Pixar for 25 years, sometimes I was the only woman in the room, or maybe one of two. And when you’re in a minority, you naturally shy away from raising subjects that might be too uncomfortable for the others. And this was…”
“…definitely uncomfortable,” Shi laughs. “Even as we were building this stuff into the film, I kept wondering how male audiences were going to react. And when we showed it to Pete and Jim [Morris, the studio’s president], we got the reaction that we wanted, which was complete embarrassment and shock.”
“And to their credit, neither of them questioned it,” Collins grins. “Though imagine how awkward it would have been for them if they had.”
Both are clear that a film with Turning Red’s content simply couldn’t have been made before now. “Ten or 15 years ago, it wouldn’t have even been pitched,” Collins says. “We just didn’t have the kind of film-makers in-house who would have dared.”
The shift, Shi believes, is due to two factors. One is the growing popularity in the West of Japanese anime, with its abundance of flawed and complex young female leads. (She credits the films of Studio Ghibli as a formative influence.) The other is the internet, where aspiring artists can share their work online and access valuable resources regardless of their sex. “These classic pencil tests from Bambi and The Jungle Book were suddenly just sitting on YouTube, ready to be studied,” she says. “And you can see the ripple effect in animation schools. Enrolment is over 50 per cent female now, which a decade ago was not the case.”
“This is the tipping point moment,” Collins glows. “In fact, Domee is the tipping point.” At this, Pixar’s bright young hope looks at her shoes. “I mean, I also just enjoy shocking people,” she responds. “So maybe I’m just a little bit of a troll.”
A 13-year-old girl finds herself turning into a smelly, hairy, bulgy, giant red panda