Turning Red (dir. Domee Shi, 2022)- Review
When a Chinese-Canadian tween channels family angst and raging hormones into a superpowered animal alter-ego, it’s “unrelatable” and “exhausting”. When a 30-something trust fund jock does it, he’s Batman. Turning Red has undergone an awkward transformation of its own, morphing from cutesy, harmless ‘Pixar movie’ into a chaotic, stultifying churn of Twitter blue-tick beef. It does seem appropriate that with a feature centring a red panda as a metaphor for puberty, Pixar finds itself in the protagonist’s shoes- torn between traditional expectations and the emergence of its own, modern identity.
Set in 2002 Toronto, Turning Red joins heroine Mei Lee as she embarks on the traditional adolescent minefield of bullies, boybands, and parental pressure. In myths of Western womanhood, such obstacles- and the awkward monster of puberty in general- call for programmed rebellion, severing the umbilical cord with an incisive smidgen of vice: Sandy’s cigarettes-and-leather glow up in Grease and Kady’s plastification in Mean Girls pick up where Moll Flanders and Lizzie Bennet left off. This ‘embarrassing’, emotional model of femininity leaves a little more wiggle room, a little more interiority, for its heroines. Such a transition from ‘girliness’ to ‘womanhood’ relies on a winking passivity, a Goldilocks-perfect balance of innocence and experience, based on light flirtation with the dark side without going full crackhead. In Hollywood form, it’s a sly, sanitized version of the same ‘keeping up appearances’ logic which has fuelled everything from aristocratic bed-hopping at the court of Louis XIV to ‘what are you doing stepbroooo’.
Flashforward to the Pixarised Canadian diaspora. Such laissez-faire attitudes don’t quite map onto Mei Lee’s experience, defined by the loving but neurotic parenting of her mother Ming (Sandra Oh), plus a hereditary ‘curse’: their ancestor Sun Yee, who transformed into a giant red panda to protect her daughters, has passed on this trait to her modern issue. Useful in ancient China, Sun Yee’s primal protective streak has become a hindrance to Mei- not least in Ming’s tendency to burst into her school waving sanitary products.
Mei’s struggles to balance her alter-ego with social and family pressures, plus her own emerging identity, align with the superhero narrative rather than the ugly duckling. Drawing on writer-director Domee Shi’s own upbringing in Toronto, Turning Red distils middle school experience to its universal hallmarks: cuteness and cringe. The outcry over Turning Red’s ‘inappropriate’ fixation on puberty suggests that the film has sexual themes. Nope. Rather, in focusing on the deeply unsexy facts of adolescence- shown to transcend not just gender and race but the fabric of space-time- Shi succeeds in shooing the perverts off the playground.
In many teen/tween arcs, the heroine’s ‘superpower’ is her sexuality- something she may recognise, and even benefit from, but which derives from the reaction of others. Comparing chubby, bespectacled Mei to twelve-year-old Matilda in Luc Besson’s Leon, it’s clear that writer-director Domee Shi has reclaimed the glorious horror of tweendom for the girls who live it.
Batman parallels prove weirdly illuminating, as Mei assumes an essentially masculine approach to the emotional rollercoaster of adolescence; confident, ambitious, and wallowing in family drama, she has a lot in common with a certain Mr Wayne. The key to this recognisable, common difference is, arguably, the cultural setting of Turning Red. Beyond the sanitising auspices of the Pixar animation style- hitherto associated with big-tent family fare, equivalent to the harmless, narcotising ‘nip of gin’ for a bothersome tot- the film distances itself from Western audiences with a lovingly depicted diaspora setting.
Rightly, much ink has been spilled on the de-sexualisation of Asian men in Hollywood movies, an afterbirth to the literature on the fetishisation of Asian women. Chinese-Canadian boy band obsessive Mei gives Shi an excellent voice with which to play on these tropes and point to their universal aspects. Orientalist ideas of ‘Confucian values’- bundling authoritarian repression, ancestral inheritances, and ‘family pride’ in a struggle with individual ‘modern’ selfhood- sell best with sex. Squid Game, for instance, didn’t offer something entirely new; the Anglo-American market wearied of capitalist dystopia after 6 seasons of Black Mirror, because it’s just not exotic enough to entertain at this point. Turning Red reframes personal struggles from a broad, sensitive perspective that celebrates the bizarre, ridiculous reality of being human. Mei’s humiliated lust for the convenience store clerk isn’t so far from the incel-ish musings of edgy blockbuster anti-heroes. Whether our demons are giant, fluffy Chinese raccoons or disappointed fathers, embarrassment is universal.
