![]() Perhaps what’s most painful about “Turning Red” is that could have been an all-time Pixar great if only director Domee Shi’s all-female team would have tolerated the infamous Pixar boil-down. Unfortunately, that meshing lasts about 10 minutes and is buried under the rest of the messy runtime. Once the movie moves toward universal themes instead of tampon talk, like a deep love between a mother and her grown daughter and a poignant moment with Mei’s Dad, the film unlocks its tear-jerking potential. Near the end, Mai’s manic pixie nature is turned down to a six, and the movie shifts entirely onto the mother-daughter relationship. Major props go to Pixar for the animation, although its art style leans much too heavily into the generic Cal-Arts style save for the Red Panda monsters, which look fantastic.įurthermore, some of the film emotionally clicks. The soundscape, which is much less excitable than the rest of the product, is well put together. As a pleasant surprise, the Chinese elements are in Cantonese instead of the usual Mandarin. Yikes.Īlthough “Turning Red” is not a competent film, some elements deserve praise. ![]() With so many mixed metaphors, the film inadvertently says women cannot be expected to be competent and that domestic abuse should be tolerated. In the film, puberty means Mei getting worse grades, catcalling boys at school, failing on hygiene, and being a much messier and less put-together person. What is here is confusing and unintentionally offensive. You’d think the emphasis of narrative would be about the mythical family panda curse, but that is bizarrely only the b-plot, with the story’s main focus being about raising funds for purchasing boy-band tickets. The film is exhausting to watch, and moves at a breakneck speed, like a westerner’s generic view of anime, throwing in as much Gen-Z humor as it possibly can every minute. ![]() Which is fine… but also, a tad limiting in its scope.”Įven taking the hormonal raccoon movie on its own merits, “Turning Red” is a confusing, jumbled mess. Sean O’Connell, the managing editor for CinemaBlend, wrote in a now-canceled review due to a case of mass hysteria in the film criticism community, that “the film legitimately feels like it was made for Domee Shi’s friends and immediate family members. That is a problem if Disney films are still supposed to be general audience pleasers. If you aren’t a progressive-leaning teenage girl or suffering from 2000s zombie nostalgia, then this film isn’t likely for you. Talking about menstruation and female puberty is not necessarily a bad topic, but it is a very limiting one. Everybody on the crew was unapologetic in support of having these real conversations about periods and about these moments in girls’ lives. It was the first thing we put into production. It was always in the very earliest versions of the film. “Turning Red” is an urban fantasy film about a 13-year-old Asian Toronto middle schooler named Mei Lee, a perfect goodie-goodie who, after the onset of puberty, discovers that the women in her family turn into giant Red Panda monsters when they get emotional or excited.Īs producer Lindsey Collins told Polygon:
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