The day I became a woman
Turning Red represents an auspicious moment for Pixar Animation Studios: its 25th feature-length film, 27 years after inventing the fully-rendered 3-D computer-animated feature with Toy Story. Many of those 25 features are medium-redefining masterpieces, like Toy Story itself, or WALL·E. An unfortunately large number of them, at this point, are thudding mediocrities, like, I am somewhat sorry to say, Turning Red. Though in its defense, out of three thudding mediocrities Pixar has signed its name to in the last two years, this is easily the least mediocre. Unlike 2020's willfully undernourished, dramaturgically half-assed Onward, it has reasonably appealing characters with interesting problems and authentic-feeling human personalities. Unlike 2021's Luca, it has, like, anything at all resembling content. And while it commits the same primordial sin as Luca in its character design (it's a 3-D version of the ubiquitous TV animation aesthetic called "CalArts Style" by people who dislike it and "Thin-Line Animation" by people who are more positive towards it, neither of which is at all accurate; I tend to think of it as "that Cartoon Network bean-mouth thing that looks fucking horrible"), this at least doesn't compound that by giving several of the characters surreally ugly rectangle-shaped faces.
But having opened in a flurry of cynicism, I'd like to try to play nice with Turning Red and focus on its strengths, so no talking about the visual aesthetic just yet. As written by Julia Cho & Domee Shi & Sarah Streicher, the story of the film is equal parts fantasy-comedy about an adorable talking animal and overt metaphor for the onset of puberty and, in particular, a 13-year-old girl experiencing menstruation for the first time. And I have to admit, I have a sneaking admiration for a family film that's able to get away with this many jokes about that biological process (starting with the title!) with the fairly explicit punchline, "haha, mom is freaking out because she (incorrectly) thinks her teenage daughter is just coated in period blood, like she was just outright bathing in it or something". If you're going to have bodily function humor, best to be as aggressive with it as possible.
Anyway "turning red" is not, in this case, literally about that; it's about 13-year-old Meilin "Mei" Lee (Rosalie Chiang), who wakes up from unsettling dreams one morning to find herself transformed into a giant red panda. This comes about, it's suggested, because she's mortified when her domineering mother Ming (Sandra Oh) discovers the cache of drawings she's made, in which a little manga-style Mei is making out with a manga version of a cute-ish boy who works at the local convenience story, and whom Mei has styled as a sexy shirtless merman. Being found out as having anything at all resembling sexual feelings has fully unnerved Mei, and apparently triggered her pandafication, which flares up any time she has any strong emotion: not just erotic ones, but happiness, anger, stress, anything. And being as she's 13 years old, pretty much all of Mei's emotions are strong.
As metaphors for puberty go, "your emotions go wild and turn you into a wild animal who snaps and snarls at your parents" is hardly a subtle one, but puberty itself isn't subtle, so I think it works. For as long as it lasts, anyway, which is surprisingly not very long: Turning Red proves to be a very scattered film, and it loses interest in the "red panda = puberty" metaphor not long after it concocts it (it loses interest in the "red panda = period" metaphor pretty much as soon as it's done using it to crack jokes). And this is not to the film's benefit: every one of the screenplay's three acts is, I would say, noticeably weaker than the one preceding it, and the third act in particular ranks among the very worst in Pixar's canon, beholden to the same "the movie must end with an action setpiece" formula that people were starting to grow suspicious over back in the 2000s, when the studio was still making far, far better movies than this. In this case, it's a pretty random narrative development that's playing fair by the rules as we've heard them, insofar as it hasn't been declared off-limits. The whole thing feels like the filmmakers realised that they'd made Ming too sympathetic and sensible (an easy thing to do, given how terrific Oh's performance is), and they needed to make her act in the most hostile, destructive ways if Mei's own arc throughout the movie was going to play as empowering and admirable, instead of just shrill and bratty (I don't think they got there, but they came closer than last year's The Mitchells vs. the Machines, which does a lot of the same things we see here in a "father and daughter" mode rather than a "mother and daughter" mode; frankly, I think mother-daughter relationships are just inherently more dramatically interesting).
Anyways, the parent/child angle isn't really the heart of the film, though it's the strongest material. The heart is the relationship between Mei and her three best friends: Miriam (Ava Morse), Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Abby (Hyein Park). The three of them help her control and later monetise her panda-shifting abilities, while they just hang out being high-energy goofballs. While I would be inclined to say that the girls don't really feel like characters, and barely even feel like "types" (Priya talks in an exaggerated deadpan and Abby tends to shout sentences rather than speak them, and that's pretty much it for distinguishing factors), they are responsible for most of the places where Turning Red does much of anything interesting with its visuals. The film is interested in being much more of a broad cartoon than any other feature Pixar has ever put out, and the place where this works out best is in the embrace of something that looks very much like limited animation, particularly the visual signifiers used in Japanese animation, both in terms of poses and in the quick shift between those poses. The best of this is all used on Abby, not nearly a significant enough character to get the film's most exciting character animation (she's very obviously "the third one" among Mei's three friends), but seeing her embody what I imagine to be Shi's own enthusiasm for Japanese animation, in speech and movement alike, is easily the most fun thing about Turning Red's style.
The other thing it does to get at that cartoony quality is to focus on bright colors and simple textures - after Luca started to turn from photorealism, Turning Red now makes a very eager stride or two away from it. Which I'm in favor of, except that the film runs into the problem that 3-D CGI animation is difficult to stylise; "simpliefied", in this case, ends up looking indistinguishable from "cheap", which the film very much wasn't. But there's a flat, dull quality to the film's images, the skin and hair of its characters, the tactility of its settings, that's simply not really doing anything. "Bright and soft" work for the film's story, and anything that's not reflexive photorealism is a welcome change; I just wish they were replaced by something that was more distinctive than just "what a well-heeled studio that wasn't Pixar might have produced in 2006". But then, having good ideas and then half-assing the execution is pretty much Turning Red's thing, so I suppose this counts as form following content.
Also, Turning Red takes place in 2002, the year that Domee Shi was 13 years old herself, and it's about as germane to the film as it is to this review.
But having opened in a flurry of cynicism, I'd like to try to play nice with Turning Red and focus on its strengths, so no talking about the visual aesthetic just yet. As written by Julia Cho & Domee Shi & Sarah Streicher, the story of the film is equal parts fantasy-comedy about an adorable talking animal and overt metaphor for the onset of puberty and, in particular, a 13-year-old girl experiencing menstruation for the first time. And I have to admit, I have a sneaking admiration for a family film that's able to get away with this many jokes about that biological process (starting with the title!) with the fairly explicit punchline, "haha, mom is freaking out because she (incorrectly) thinks her teenage daughter is just coated in period blood, like she was just outright bathing in it or something". If you're going to have bodily function humor, best to be as aggressive with it as possible.
Anyway "turning red" is not, in this case, literally about that; it's about 13-year-old Meilin "Mei" Lee (Rosalie Chiang), who wakes up from unsettling dreams one morning to find herself transformed into a giant red panda. This comes about, it's suggested, because she's mortified when her domineering mother Ming (Sandra Oh) discovers the cache of drawings she's made, in which a little manga-style Mei is making out with a manga version of a cute-ish boy who works at the local convenience story, and whom Mei has styled as a sexy shirtless merman. Being found out as having anything at all resembling sexual feelings has fully unnerved Mei, and apparently triggered her pandafication, which flares up any time she has any strong emotion: not just erotic ones, but happiness, anger, stress, anything. And being as she's 13 years old, pretty much all of Mei's emotions are strong.
As metaphors for puberty go, "your emotions go wild and turn you into a wild animal who snaps and snarls at your parents" is hardly a subtle one, but puberty itself isn't subtle, so I think it works. For as long as it lasts, anyway, which is surprisingly not very long: Turning Red proves to be a very scattered film, and it loses interest in the "red panda = puberty" metaphor not long after it concocts it (it loses interest in the "red panda = period" metaphor pretty much as soon as it's done using it to crack jokes). And this is not to the film's benefit: every one of the screenplay's three acts is, I would say, noticeably weaker than the one preceding it, and the third act in particular ranks among the very worst in Pixar's canon, beholden to the same "the movie must end with an action setpiece" formula that people were starting to grow suspicious over back in the 2000s, when the studio was still making far, far better movies than this. In this case, it's a pretty random narrative development that's playing fair by the rules as we've heard them, insofar as it hasn't been declared off-limits. The whole thing feels like the filmmakers realised that they'd made Ming too sympathetic and sensible (an easy thing to do, given how terrific Oh's performance is), and they needed to make her act in the most hostile, destructive ways if Mei's own arc throughout the movie was going to play as empowering and admirable, instead of just shrill and bratty (I don't think they got there, but they came closer than last year's The Mitchells vs. the Machines, which does a lot of the same things we see here in a "father and daughter" mode rather than a "mother and daughter" mode; frankly, I think mother-daughter relationships are just inherently more dramatically interesting).
Anyways, the parent/child angle isn't really the heart of the film, though it's the strongest material. The heart is the relationship between Mei and her three best friends: Miriam (Ava Morse), Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Abby (Hyein Park). The three of them help her control and later monetise her panda-shifting abilities, while they just hang out being high-energy goofballs. While I would be inclined to say that the girls don't really feel like characters, and barely even feel like "types" (Priya talks in an exaggerated deadpan and Abby tends to shout sentences rather than speak them, and that's pretty much it for distinguishing factors), they are responsible for most of the places where Turning Red does much of anything interesting with its visuals. The film is interested in being much more of a broad cartoon than any other feature Pixar has ever put out, and the place where this works out best is in the embrace of something that looks very much like limited animation, particularly the visual signifiers used in Japanese animation, both in terms of poses and in the quick shift between those poses. The best of this is all used on Abby, not nearly a significant enough character to get the film's most exciting character animation (she's very obviously "the third one" among Mei's three friends), but seeing her embody what I imagine to be Shi's own enthusiasm for Japanese animation, in speech and movement alike, is easily the most fun thing about Turning Red's style.
The other thing it does to get at that cartoony quality is to focus on bright colors and simple textures - after Luca started to turn from photorealism, Turning Red now makes a very eager stride or two away from it. Which I'm in favor of, except that the film runs into the problem that 3-D CGI animation is difficult to stylise; "simpliefied", in this case, ends up looking indistinguishable from "cheap", which the film very much wasn't. But there's a flat, dull quality to the film's images, the skin and hair of its characters, the tactility of its settings, that's simply not really doing anything. "Bright and soft" work for the film's story, and anything that's not reflexive photorealism is a welcome change; I just wish they were replaced by something that was more distinctive than just "what a well-heeled studio that wasn't Pixar might have produced in 2006". But then, having good ideas and then half-assing the execution is pretty much Turning Red's thing, so I suppose this counts as form following content.
Also, Turning Red takes place in 2002, the year that Domee Shi was 13 years old herself, and it's about as germane to the film as it is to this review.
