Critics be warned: Turning Red is defiantly Asian and female – and there’s more to come
“Some Pixar films are made for universal audiences. Turning Red is not. The target audience for this one feels very specific and very narrow. If you are in it, this might work very well for you. I am not in it. This was exhausting.”
With this tweet and the slag review it pointed to, Sean O’Connell, critic for the film site Cinema Blend, exploded the internet, launching a conversation about representation and privilege in storytelling that continues to echo weeks after Turning Red’s release.
The problem with his take on Domee Shi’s debut Pixar feature wasn’t that he didn’t like it – we’re all entitled to our own opinions, though some of us seem more entitled than others – but because of the governing thesis of his actual review (since “unpublished” with an apology), which suggested that any story not told to accommodate his personal perspective as a white male was impossible for him to comprehend, much less enjoy.
And O’Connell was just the loudest in a mob of detractors sharing a curious uniformity in gender and lack of melanin. The YouTube movie reviewer Sean Chandler called Turning
Red “Pixar’s most polarizing film … lots of people are loving it. But there’s a handful of us which it really rubbed the wrong way.”
Like all the best stories, Turning Red speaks from a POV that’s detailed, specific and idiosyncratic: it’s about a Chinese Canadian girl named Mei Lee growing up in 90s Toronto, who with her three girlfriends – two of them also Asian – are dancing at the threshold of puberty, confronting hormonal surges and bodily urges that even they can’t quite process. Also: the girl is magically cursed to turn into a giant red panda whenever she has intense feelings. So yes, for those in the audience who aren’t 13-year-old girls or red pandas, the context may be obscure, and possibly a bit frightening.
But as others quickly pointed out, these critics don’t make the same complaints about protagonists from other planets or planes of existence; in his thumbs-down review O’Connell favorably mentioned earlier Pixar films starring animate toys and furry blue monsters, and even The Mitchells vs The Machines, the Netflix feature about a young (white) woman and her (white) family defending Earth from a robot takeover. (The robots are also white.)
So what is it about Turning Red that he finds so exhausting? Is it that Mei Lee is also … Asian?
The answer seems to be: Mei Be. Here’s the reality. When you’re white, most of what you see in American popular culture is designed with you as the default. That’s even more the case when you’re a white male of a certain age, the Prime Demographic. Because if you are, you’ve been the laser-focused target of nearly every Hollywood blockbuster since the industry was created. Male characters are crafted to be aspirational to you, and female ones to be attractive to you, in works largely imagined, created and marketed by people who also happen to belong to the Prime Demographic.
Which is why O’Connell felt safe in making this prediction: “There’s an audience out there for Turning Red. And when that audience finds the movie, I’ve no doubt they will celebrate it for the unique animal that it is. In my opinion, however, that audience is relatively small, and I’m not part of it.”
Imagine thinking that people who are of Asian descent (a majority of humans) and aren’t male (also a majority of humans) are a “relatively small” segment of the population.
But that’s the consequence of having your pop culture needs catered to by the concierge of Hollywood for so many generations: everyone beyond the pale tip of your nose ends up becoming a featureless blur. Because the truth is, even stuff that isn’t by and about your explicit segment of the moviegoing public is still expected to be made accessible to you, which, interestingly enough, means that it must fall at one of two extremes: it either has to be framed as incredibly weird and alien, a cult experience offered up for cultural tourism purposes; or it has to be flattened, softened and lightened to make it as readily digest
ible as possible, turning it into a bland, premasticated porridge of mild difference, without spice or bones.
Bizarro buffet or pabulum – those are the two ends of the spectrum that provide the Prime Demographic with cinematic comfort. Between the two is a deep uncanny valley of stories that look vaguely familiar, but aren’t reflexively accommodating; that demand acknowledgment of vibrant worlds and valid worldviews existing right under the tip of one’s pale nose; that resist easy explanation and flippant exoticization. And in this chasm sits Turning Red, a movie about young humans who aren’t male (!) or white (!) or even American (!) and have biological yearnings (!). For O’Connell and other critics of the movie – who have included a clamor of white fundamentalist parents who’ve bemoaned that it seems to encourage girls to not listen to their parents, or listen to their bodies, or something, and an array of xenophobes complaining about the film featuring “too many turbans and hijabs” – the “turning into a giant red panda” thing is its least uncomfortable aspect.
Well, here’s a warning for those who shudder at the delightful, subjectively female and defiantly Asian spectacle of Turning Red: there’s a lot more of that coming down the line. Alongside it in theaters now is Umma, Iris K Shim’s horror film about an overly obsessive mother who attempts to magically control her daughter from beyond the grave (Turning Dead!). Coming this week is Everything Everywhere All At Once, the brilliantly psychedelic Michelle Yeoh martial-arts-multiverse movie you never knew you always wanted – super weird, but in so many ways all too familiar, and absolutely uncompromising in the way it centers its story of rejection and reconciliation between, yes, a wayward daughter, an Asian mother and … a cosmic everything bagel? (Spurning Bread!)
The fact is, hiking down into the uncanny valley of the near-and-novel can be exhausting, for those who haven’t stretched their horizons or exercised their empathy muscles. But it’s a trek that many of us have had to do all our lives, and learned to embrace, even if it’s a constant reminder that our demographic is sub-prime. Even if – or especially if – the contexts we’re put in as a result are obscure, and possibly a bit frightening.
After all, that’s exactly what makes cinema magical: it allows us to see ourselves in something other than our own exact reflection. Because who, other than a narcissist, would want to stare at a mirror all day?
Rise: A Pop History of Asian America from the Nineties to Now by By Jeff Yang, Phil Yu, and Philip Wang is out now