Pixar tackles a taboo with charm, sensitivity and lots of laughs
Turning Red PG cert, 100 min
★★★★★
Dir Domee Shi Starring Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Ava Morse, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Hyein Park (voices)
It’s hard to know what’s more impressive about the latest Pixar film: its boundless artistry, ingenuity and loopy comic verve, or the mere fact that the studio got away with making it. The house of Toy Story has long been known for using metaphor to unlock shuttered subjects, but Turning Red explores terrain on which almost no other family film, animated or otherwise, has yet dared set foot.
Directed and co-written by Domee Shi, the film’s subject is puberty – and female puberty specifically, with all the distinct bodily changes and processes it entails. Its heroine is 13-year-old Toronto schoolgirl Meilin Lee (winningly voiced by Rosalie Chiang), who wakes one morning to find she’s inherited a strange and secret family trait: at moments of heightened emotion, she now uncontrollably transforms into a giant red panda. And as such, life becomes a clamour of strange smells, embarrassing bulges and awkward animal cravings.
In itself, this is a brilliantly devised, comedically fertile allegory – and it’s easy to imagine a perfectly decent version of Turning Red which presented it without further comment. But instead, Shi and Julia Cho’s screenplay calmly unpacks it in broad daylight.
Mei finds herself buffeted by lust, ogling male classmates during PE. She and her friends plot a trip to see her favourite boy band, 4*Town, against the express wishes of her parents. Most strikingly, her strait-laced mother (Sandra Oh) initially but wrongly assumes “the change” is her daughter’s first period, and blusters into the bathroom talking about the blooming of her “red flower” and brandishing a stack of sanitary products, while Mei cowers behind the shower curtain in panda form.
Now hold on a moment. When was the last time you saw this completely normal aspect of womanhood addressed so matter-of-factly – or even at all – in a film suitable for those who were yet to experience it? Studio Ghibli’s Only Yesterday did it in 1991. And there was Anna Chlumsky’s memorable yet still slightly oblique yelp of “I’m haemorrhaging!” in My Girl – also 1991, which must have been the year for it. After that, we reach the realm of horror: Raw, Ginger Snaps, Carrie. And wonderful as those are, they’re hardly the stuff of adolescent pep talks. (At least we menfolk always had Teen Wolf.)
But it would be wrong to suggest that makes Turning Red a shocking film, somehow: in fact, it’s an unstoppably charming one. Still, for viewers old enough to apprehend what’s going on, its frankness does pack a certain jolt. Shi’s film uses the onset of Mei’s magical puberty, sensitively and playfully, as a catalyst for cringe comedy.
It works as beautifully as it does because the film’s comedy has been machined with Swiss precision, and all of its characters written with obvious love: the closest thing it has to villains are two well-meaning but fallible parents. Visual flourishes are seamlessly swiped from Japanese anime, from hand-drawn panic lines to hilarious crash-zooms, while the slapstick is poetry: weighted, inventive and rhythmically perfect.
Experienced with an audience, it would be extra-glorious. For now, however, thanks to Disney’s decision to divert Turning Red to its in-house streaming service during January’s omicron swell, it’s a living-room-only proposition. Hopefully that choice isn’t indefinitely binding: there should be space in our cinemas for animation this quirkily courageous. But the fact that there’s room for it at a major studio is startling enough.
On Disney+ from Friday