Mei Lee (voice of Rosalie Chiang) is an overachieving student who leaves her trio of devoted friends every day to rush home to help her mom (Sandra Oh) run their family\u2019s temple in Chinatown, basically checking every \u201cperfect daughter\u201d box. Mei\u2019s mom doesn\u2019t feel that far removed from the loving (but, uh, overbearing) mother in Shi\u2019s \u201cBao,\u201d and Mei is rightfully beginning to feel stifled \u2014 along with all the other feelings that begin to bubble over around the age of 13. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, Mei doesn\u2019t have the typical experience of a tween girl going through ch-ch-changes; thanks to a bargain made by her ancestor, all the women in her lineage turn into red pandas with any extreme emotion when they come of age. Mei feels everything: all-consuming love for boy band 4*Town, pure rage at school bully Tyler (Tristan Allerick Chen), a squishy crush on 17-year-old Devon (Addison Chandler), and utter shame at her mom\u2019s overprotective involvement in her life. So to her mortification, she keeps morphing into the scarlet monster at every turn. However, her mother promises that she can forever stop the transformation with a ritual, if she can only keep the beast at bay until the right time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Turning Red<\/em> isn\u2019t purely <\/em>about Mei getting her period \u2014 though her mom initially thinks that\u2019s the big change Mei is worried about, instead of, you know, turning into a giant red panda \u2014 but it is more explicit about menstruation than a Disney\/Pixar movie has ever been allowed to be, with boxes of pads and mention of the \u201cred peony.\u201d It\u2019s still subtle enough that it won\u2019t replace \u2014 or even catalyze \u2014 the sex talk for younger viewers, and it will likely fly right over their tiny heads for any parents concerned they aren\u2019t ready yet. But Turning Red<\/em> features a refreshing frankness about how bodies change in adolescence, from unexpected raging hormones to newly stinky pits, and seeing this universal experience on screen somehow feels revolutionary. <\/p>\n\n\n\n While this is absolutely a movie about the specific experience of being a teenage girl during puberty, it isn\u2019t only<\/em> that. It\u2019s also about not being afraid to be your authentic, weirdo self. Mei has her equally odd \u2014 and absolutely wonderful \u2014 friends Miriam (Ava Morse), Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), and Abby (Hyein Park), but many of the other kids see her as strange. With the crushing weight of her mother\u2019s expectations of what her daughter should be, Mei also doesn\u2019t feel like she can be herself even at home. She finds freedom and calm with her friends, who are her haven from pretending to be the well-behaved, straight-A student who doesn\u2019t care about boys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The girls\u2019 crushes on Devon and boy band 4*Town are among the film\u2019s many delights. Mei draws doodles about Devon in her notebook, leading to some of the movie\u2019s funniest and most mortifying scenes. Every moment surrounding 4*Town \u2014 from the nonexistent personalities of the group\u2019s lesser members to the extremely catchy original songs by Billie Eilish and Finneas O\u2019Connell \u2014 perfectly recreates what it was like to love this kind of music and these kinds of guys in the \u201890s and \u201800s. (Jordan Knight, forever.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n While Turning Red<\/em> is clearly fantasy, it still feels grounded in the real world, thanks to details like these. Shi and co-writer Julia Cho finely capture aspects of the era, with the girls\u2019 fashion, Mei\u2019s Tamagotchi, and the \u201cda bomb\u201d slang. The streets of Toronto feel true to life (even when there\u2019s a giant red panda bounding over the city\u2019s roofs), and Shi doesn\u2019t shy away from using Canadian phrasing like \u201cgrade eight\u201d and \u201ctuque.\u201d However, what really adds to the film\u2019s sense of authenticity is all the elements of Mei\u2019s cultural identity as a Chinese-Canadian girl living in Chinatown, from the Lee\u2019s food (unsurprisingly, the bao practically play a supporting role here) to the TV show Mei watches with her mom. None of it feels forced either; Shi is bringing her own identity to the screen, and it\u2019s so welcome.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The animation is as gorgeous as you\u2019d expect from a Pixar movie, with the red panda action and the expressiveness of Mei\u2019s face standing out. It\u2019s a shame that Turning Red<\/em> is getting its premiere on Disney+ instead of on the big screen. More people will get to see it sooner, but there\u2019s so much vibrancy throughout the film, as well as an epic climax, that it deserves to be seen on a screen that\u2019s larger than Mei\u2019s red panda alter ego. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Shi\u2019s first official credit was as a story artist on Inside Out<\/em>, which feels fitting given both films\u2019 focus on emotions and inner life. For her first full-length film, Shi has made a movie equally as thoughtful and creative as that Pixar favorite, and it\u2019s just as likely to induce Bing Bong-levels of tears. Turning Red<\/em> is emblematic of the animation studio at its best, full of emotional intelligence and creative innovation, as likely to please children as it is adults.\u00a0 Pixar’s newest animated feature is a sweet, charming delight – and, in spite of what you might have heard, an extremely relatable one. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":594,"featured_media":18015,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[340],"tags":[1098],"class_list":["post-18013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-movie-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/594"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18013"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22025,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18013\/revisions\/22025"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/turning-red2-1024x682.jpg\")
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<\/p>\n\n\n\nA<\/strong><\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"