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Back in middle school, when she was barely a young teen, this critic had, ahem, a massive crush on a boy one year her senior.

I can’t recall if we were already a couple when I foolishly filled my notebook with his name and some sappily romantic sentiments one evening, not knowing that the embarrassing pad would soon be discovered by my annoyingly overprotective detective of a mother. But I do remember sweating in shame, fear, confusion, and panic when she yanked the notebook from under me (in desperation, I sat on it to unsuccessfully hide the evidence of my young love) and started flipping the pages in utter shock and anger.

Now imagine my astonishment during Oscar-winning “Bao” helmer Domee Shi ’s masterful animation “Turning Red,” while I watched its 13-year-old central character undergo a similar episode with her own mother! The heroine in question is the overachieving Meilin ( Rosalie Chiang )—Mei for her loved ones—growing up too fast with her budding hormones and changing body amid her Chinese-Canadian family in the Toronto of the early aughts. A slightly dorky straight-A student she may be, but there's nothing anyone could do to stop her from noticing all the good-looking boys—particularly a local store clerk—that she and her best friends frequently gush over. That anyone includes her disciplined, willowy mother Ming ( Sandra Oh ), who discovers Mei’s notebook of suggestive heartthrob drawings in furious disbelief. What’s Mei to do if not literally turn red and POOF, transform into a furry, monstrously cute red panda in the midst of navigating all these intense emotions? (Why hadn't I thought of this when I was similarly busted? And more importantly, where was this movie when I was growing up?)

And that is the genius of “Turning Red,” a radical, brazenly hormonal PG movie that instantly fills a huge void in the lives of awkward, novel female teens who might just be starting to crawl out of their childhood cocoons with a disharmony of mystifying awakenings and sexual feelings. That achievement is perhaps no surprise coming from Pixar, a studio that can always be trusted for a generous dose of reflective, grown-up nostalgia as well as a good old-fashioned coming-of-age saga. After all, weren’t some of the best characters of the fiercely inventive animation house—from the talking dolls of the “ Toy Story ” franchise to the corporeal feelings of “ Inside Out ,” the rebellious princess of “ Brave ,” and the aspiring young musician of “ Coco ”—gloriously defined by its signature preoccupations? Still, “Turning Red” (which deserves a lot better than the straight-to-streaming fate Disney has bestowed upon it) feels pioneering and surprising even for the shop behind the groundbreaking animated sci-fi “WALL-E.” For starters, never before has a Disney female ever been asked, “Has the red peony blossomed?” as an inquiry about the start of her menstruation. 

In that regard, “Turning Red” is both a triumphant thematic homecoming for the company and a welcome outlier within the Pixar canon that is, exceptions aside, typically over-flooded with male-centric narratives. What’s even greater about it is its recognizable foundation carrying shades of various superhero tales and the likes of “Teen Wolf” (the 1985 one). You know, stories in which boys and men hide behind their alter-egos while they make sense of the new eyes through which they see the world. Written by Shi and Julia Cho , “Turning Red” passes this familiar baton to Mei, unearthing something that is both culturally specific and universal through its Chinese-Canadian protagonist clearly fashioned by the co-scribes with heaps of personal memories and loving insights.

It’s certainly a delight to follow Mei once she discovers her inner red panda and figures out that as long as she keeps a cool and collected demeanor sans emotions with a little help from her friends, the pink brute won’t take over. Who knows, she could perhaps even lead a normal life and even have some fun along the way. But that’s easier said than done when you’re a teenage girl defined by your wobbly mood swings and the time you spend with your equally frenzied group of friends. In Mei’s case, her girlhood clan consists of the sharp-tongued Abby ( Hyein Park ), nonconformist Miriam ( Ava Morse ), and the nonchalant Priya ( Maitreyi Ramakrishnan ). Together, the celebrated quartet swing from one trouble to the next, trying to do everything they can to see their dreamy boy band 4*Town in concert. (The five-member band does have some actual bangers in the film, written by Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell.) But with Mei’s plush red panda slightly altering their plans, the friends finds themselves at a crossroads that directly concerns the young Mei’s future.

As it turns out, Mei had been cursed with a spell passed on through the generations of women in her family. And it can only be broken if she willingly participates in a strenuous ritual that would keep her nuisance alter-ego safely tucked away forever. Through this dilemma, Shi beautifully constructs a traditional tale of generational clash between Mei and her mother, filling their unity and contradictions with thoughtful details of their urban life: the family temple they run as a tourist attraction, the elaborate, studiously cooked meals, the domestic support that runs deep within their household. The animation style—infused with traditional motifs, interludes of anime, and a zippy energy—rises to the occasion, vividly painting Mei’s world with the same level of intricacy Shi and Cho conjure up on the page. While the film’s slightly bloated finale overpowers some of the leaner moments that come before it, “Turning Red” flickers with a bright feminine spirit, one that feels new, crimson-deep, and unapologetically rebellious.

On Disney+ on Friday, March 11th.

Tomris Laffly

Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to  RogerEbert.com , Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets.

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Film credits.

Turning Red (2022)

Rated PG for thematic material, suggestive content and language.

100 minutes

Rosalie Chiang as Mei Lee (voice)

Sandra Oh as Ming (voice)

Jordan Fisher as Robaire (voice)

Grayson Villanueva as Tae Young (voice)

Josh Levi as Aaron Z. (voice)

Topher Ngo as Aaron T. (voice)

Finneas O'Connell as Jesse (voice)

Orion Lee as Jin Lee (voice)

Wai Ching Ho as Mei's Grandma (voice)

Ava Morse as Miriam (voice)

Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as Priya (voice)

Hyein Park as Abby (voice)

Addie Chandler as Devon (voice)

Cinematographer

• Jonathan Pytko
• Mahyar Abousaeedi
• Nicholas C. Smith
• Steve Bloom
• Ludwig Göransson

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Movie Reviews

'turning red' confronts the messiness of adolescence with refreshing honesty.

Justin Chang

In Turning Red , 13-year-old Mei Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) "poofs" into a giant red panda whenever she gets too excited. Disney/Pixar hide caption

In Turning Red , 13-year-old Mei Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) "poofs" into a giant red panda whenever she gets too excited.

Three years ago, the writer-director Domee Shi won an Oscar for her delightful Pixar animated short, Bao . In telling the sweet and surreal story of a Chinese Canadian mother and a steamed dumpling that comes to life, it captured something funny and poignant about the cultural and generational differences that can divide Asian immigrant families.

With her first feature, Turning Red , Shi leans further into the complexities of Asian parent-child relationships — and this time, she's come up with an even wilder conceit. If you were to mash together Carrie and The Joy Luck Club , and somehow still get away with a PG rating, it might look a bit like this movie.

The story is set in the early 2000s, and it follows a 13-year-old girl named Meilin Lee, voiced by Rosalie Chiang, who lives in Toronto's Chinatown. Mei is an obedient overachiever, a straight-A student who spends her free time helping her parents run a temple built to honor their Chinese ancestors.

While Mei's father is shy and mostly stays out of the way, her mother, Ming — a terrific Sandra Oh — is attentive to the point of overbearing. In addition to being super-involved with Mei's studies, Ming rigorously polices her daughter's social life, in hopes that she won't be too influenced by Western ways.

But while Mei may look like the perfect daughter, she has interests of her own, like any teenager. She's starting to notice boys, and she and her friends are particularly obsessed with an 'N Sync -style boy band. And then one morning, in a twist that riffs on Kafka's The Metamorphosis and countless werewolf movies, she discovers that she's turned into an enormous red panda, with bright red-orange fur and a long, bushy tail. She promptly flips out.

Movie Interviews

In pixar's first female-directed short, a dumpling child fills an empty nest.

Director Shi, who wrote the script with Julia Cho, confronts the messiness of adolescence with an honesty that's refreshing in the world of studio animation. Mei's transformation is clearly a metaphor for the onset of puberty, when your body betrays you and becomes unrecognizable overnight. But it's a metaphor for something else, too. As it turns out, the red-panda effect is the result of some very ancient Chinese magic that's been passed down to Mei through the women in her family.

It may be a ridiculous setup, but as in most Pixar movies, even the most outlandish plot devices have their own narrative logic. Mei soon figures out that her panda persona is triggered by intense emotions; whenever she calms down, she turns back into her human self.

Her mom instructs her to suppress her feelings and the panda along with it. But then something funny happens: Her friends find out about the panda, and rather than being weirded out by it, they think it's the cutest, coolest thing ever. Soon, Mei is newly popular and having the time of her life, and she starts to wonder: What if the panda, far from being some shameful aberration, is actually the truest expression of her happy, goofy, emotional self?

And so Turning Red tells a story about shame, repression and social anxiety — areas that I, like more than a few Asian Americans, know a thing or two about. During the movie, I found myself sometimes wincing in recognition at Mei's tension and embarrassment as she's torn between her family and friends. I also balked at moments that seemed to exaggerate for comic effect, especially when it came to Mei's mother, who's clearly been conceived along the lines of the controversial "tiger mom" stereotype.

All of which is to say that Turning Red gives you a lot of ideas to grapple with. It also gives you a lot to look at. Director Shi and her collaborators have a lot of fun incorporating East Asian influences into the story and animation. You can see touches of Japanese anime in the character design; Mei's panda has the fluffy, oversized proportions of Hayao Miyazaki 's Totoro. The action-heavy climax manages to salute kaiju movies like Godzilla and martial-arts epics like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon .

Turning Red knows that teenage life can sometimes feel like a monster movie and sometimes it's an action movie — and now, happily, it's a Pixar movie, and one of the bolder ones to come along in a while.

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Turning Red Reviews

Turning Red’s funny, sweet, and empathetic portrait of cultural identity, gentle teen rebellion, and tetchy mother-daughter relations gets an extra boost from fake boy band 4*Town.

Full Review | Feb 9, 2024

Domee Shi’s direction is so unique and fun, but it can also overpower a lot of the emotions and or sentiment.

Full Review | Feb 8, 2024

Pixar’s delightful ode to female adolescence...

Full Review | Sep 13, 2023

The film stresses how the best way to hold on tight to a child is to loosen your grip.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 10, 2023

Turning Red is a rollercoaster of a film that takes different turns as the story unfolds leaving audiences engaged with Mei and her family. It is full of thrills and nostalgia while also feeling like a reinvention of Pixar.

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

A delightful surprise! Not just one of Pixar’s most personal stories yet… but a great coming of age story that will bring you back to your days in 8th grade & puberty.

Full Review | Jul 25, 2023

Turning Red is the riskiest, possibly the most divisive work in Pixar history. Without any remorse or restraint, Domee Shi and Julia Cho unapologetically approach the sensitive topic of (female) puberty in a quite shocking, positively impactful manner.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jul 25, 2023

Yes, Turning Red is about a specific life and a specific culture, but its specificity is its greatest strength. A lesson we can all learn.

Turning Red finds ways to creatively illustrate the growing pains of adolescence and its root causes. It's a tear-inducing stroll down memory lane.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 21, 2023

Even when pandamonium breaks out Shi always has the emotional backdrop fully under control.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 26, 2023

A Pixar film with an energized spirit, along with a gentle and patient heart.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jan 4, 2023

With winning characters and an engaging storyline, Turning Red is a humorous look at the awkwardness of growing up and figuring out how to break away and hold on at the same time.

Full Review | Dec 22, 2022

Turning Red celebrates femininity, friendship, and family, in addition to being really funny.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Dec 10, 2022

Pixar movies are often in the hunt for end-of-the-year awards, and “Turning Red” looks like a good bet this awards season.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Dec 2, 2022

"Turning Red rejects this progression of events as a birthright, and allows Meilin the agency to choose her own path and lean into the difference that makes her special. It’s a truly stunning execution of a much-needed message."

Full Review | Nov 19, 2022

Whether you zero in on generations of female empowerment and healing, or the lush tail of a gigantic furry beast, there is something for everyone in Turning Red.

Full Review | Oct 11, 2022

Turning Red finds Pixar surveying some of its most mature subject matter yet - strengthened by cultural specificity - while simultaneously retaining the studio’s signature heart and humor.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 1, 2022

a funny, compassionate and intelligent animated coming-of-age film with art that communicates the beauty of Chinese culture… addresses the myriad, complex, feelings and sensations of puberty and adolescence with honesty and sensitivity to nuance

Full Review | Aug 23, 2022

Director Domee Shi, who won an Academy Award® for her Pixar short film Bao, makes her feature film directing debut with a story that is both extremely personal and thematically universal.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 22, 2022

Disney/Pixar are taking a big leap with this film - they've mined the Grimm fairy tales and harvested their own back catalogue - but they're hopefully finding that investing in filmmakers and their own personal experiences pays equal dividends.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 9, 2022

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Turning red, common sense media reviewers.

Pixar coming-of-age tale explores puberty and parent issues.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Promotes open and honest communication between par

Mei is a caring, thoughtful daughter, a compassion

Main character Mei and her family (as well as writ

The panda transformation can come with a dark side

Young teens have crushes on members of a boy band.

Insult language like "dork," "narc," "brainwashed,

Off-screen product tie-ins.

Mei's mom makes a comment that a boy's behavior is

Parents need to know that Turning Red is Pixar's coming-of-age adventure set in early-2000s Toronto about Meilin "Mei" Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang), a Chinese Canadian teen who unleashes a literal red panda when she starts going through puberty. The panda transformation -- which can sometimes be intense and…

Positive Messages

Promotes open and honest communication between parents and kids, particularly teens. Highlights challenges of adolescence and how the process can deepen bonds between friends and between parents and teens. Encourages curiosity, compassion, courage, self-control, teamwork.

Positive Role Models

Mei is a caring, thoughtful daughter, a compassionate friend. After her inner panda is unleashed, she becomes more curious, adventurous, courageous, but she also lies to her parents and keeps secrets from them. In one scene, she's disrespectful after weeks of not being honest with them. Mei's parents, especially her mom, have high expectations and can seem overprotective, but they love her unconditionally, want to do what's best for her. Mei's friends are supportive, kind, honest.

Diverse Representations

Main character Mei and her family (as well as writer-director Domee Shi) are Chinese Canadian; Mei's best friends are White, South Asian, and Korean. Mei's Canadian nationality and Chinese ethnicity are both prominently featured, and voice actors were cast authentically. Mei lives in Chinatown, and her family runs a temple. Strong representation of a young woman going through puberty and the confusing, awkward, hormonally charged nature of adolescence. Tight girl friendships are a major theme.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

The panda transformation can come with a dark side. When the panda gets angry, she can cause both purposeful and accidental damage. Lunar ceremony that Mei goes through seems painful. Mass property damage during a concert scene when a giant, somewhat scary red panda wreaks havoc, forcing concertgoers to run for their lives; even the musicians look in danger (it's eventually played for laughs). After she transforms, Mei is kept in her room and jumps around, butting her head against walls and causing minor damage. Mei throws a dodgeball with her panda arm, and it goes so fast the ball breaks a window. Supernatural pandas push and fight one another. Arguments, confrontations.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Young teens have crushes on members of a boy band. They kiss the band's CD and poster and talk about the attractiveness of each member. A girl finds a boy cute and ends up sketching various images of him -- e.g., him as a merman, the two of them kissing, etc. She sweats as she draws the images, telegraphing her attraction/infatuation. Discussions of "hotness" and the boy band's gyrating moves. Teen hormones and puberty/adolescence (including talk of a girl's period) are a major theme.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Insult language like "dork," "narc," "brainwashed," "jerkwad," "butthead," "freak," "psycho mom," "creepy temple," and "crap."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Drinking, drugs & smoking.

Mei's mom makes a comment that a boy's behavior is the result of not wearing sunblock and of "doing drugs all day."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Turning Red is Pixar's coming-of-age adventure set in early-2000s Toronto about Meilin "Mei" Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang), a Chinese Canadian teen who unleashes a literal red panda when she starts going through puberty. The panda transformation -- which can sometimes be intense and leads to both unintended and purposeful damage/destruction -- is definitely a metaphor for adolescence, and the movie skews more toward an older tween/early teen audience than many of Pixar's other films. The story centers the city's Chinatown community where Mei lives and features an authentically diverse cast. With puberty and adolescence at the heart of the action, expect references to periods and celebrity crushes, discussions of "hotness," and descriptions of the attractiveness of popular singers (as well as another older teen) and their gyrating dance moves. Occasional mild and insult language includes "crap," "freak," "jerkwad," "butthead," etc. The film encourages curiosity, compassion, courage, self-control, and teamwork, and families who watch together can discuss lots of issues afterward, from the importance of having honest conversations about puberty to the dangers of lying and keeping secrets and the need for both close friends and trusted adults. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (282)
• Kids say (271)

Based on 282 parent reviews

Don’t be misled by over-critical reviews

Too heavy handed for its intended audience, what's the story.

Set in Toronto circa 2003, Pixar's TURNING RED centers on 13-year-old Meilin "Mei" Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang), a rule-following middle schooler who's the only child of her overprotective parents, type-A Ming ( Sandra Oh ) and quiet Jin ( Orion Lee ), who run a Buddhist temple in the city's Chinatown. Mei and her three best friends -- Miriam (Ava Morse), Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), and Abby (Hyein Park) -- are infatuated with popular boy band 4Town and crush on a local teen who works at a convenience store. One morning, after an unsettling dream about both real and celebrity boys, Mei wakes up transformed into a literal red panda. She finds out that the metamorphosis is an ancestral rite of passage for the women in her family when they reach puberty, but that a lunar ceremony can confine the panda into an amulet. Since strong emotions can bring on the transformation, Mei must call upon all her meditation skills to resist the change until the ceremony can take place. That works for a while, until her friends convince her that changing into the panda could be fun -- and lucrative.

Is It Any Good?

Delightful, funny, unapologetically girl-centered, and a surprisingly touching allegory for adolescence, this is Pixar's most teen-friendly film. It's also a gift for anyone who remembers the onset of puberty, pining over musicians (in this case, a shout-out to millennials who crushed on O-Town, *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, and the like), and struggling to balance meeting parental expectations with friendships and newfound interests. Chiang does a lovely job conveying Mei's emotional and physical changes -- how she genuinely wants to obey her parents, take care of their family temple, and be a good girl but also enjoys her BFFs, loud music, and, yes, boys (even if they are of the unattainable pop-heartthrob variety). And Oh, who's also Canadian, is ideally cast as Mei's mom, who's more complex than the fussy helicopter mom she initially seems to be. Although dad Jin is a kind and loving presence, Turning Red is at heart a story about mothers and daughters. Mei and Ming's dynamic is in some ways universal: the bittersweet and at times outright confrontational push-and-pull of surviving teen rebellion (whatever that looks like).

Visually, Turning Red , like all Pixar movies, is phenomenal. Director Domee Shi (who herself is Chinese Canadian and was 13 in 2002), is clearly drawing on her own lived experiences of Toronto, its Chinatown, and being a teen in the early '00s. The movie, like her short film Bao , is also an emotional reminder of the tender joy and turbulent angst of growing up -- particularly with a demanding but loving mother who has sky-high expectations. But audiences don't need to be Canadian, Chinese, women, girls, or millennials to relate to and enjoy this story, because its themes and central metaphor work for everyone who has or will experience the awkward excitement of transforming from child to teen. Like Inside Out or The Mitchells vs. the Machines , Turning Red is a standout addition to animated movies that capture the overwhelming feelings of coming-of-age.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the theme of adolescence in Turning Red . How is puberty/coming-of-age a major part of the story? Do you think that makes the movie more relevant to tweens and teens than to younger kids?

Why do you think Mei always feels like she has to do what her parents, particularly her mother, wants? How does she learn to tell her parents the truth? Did you find the movie's family dynamics relatable?

How do Mei and other characters display courage , curiosity , empathy , and teamwork ? Why are those important character strengths?

Did you relate to the movie's setting -- both the time (early 2000s) and the place (Canada)? Do you think that's necessary to appreciate the story's themes and messages?

Movie Details

• On DVD or streaming : May 3, 2022
• Cast : Rosalie Chiang , Sandra Oh , James Hong
• Director : Domee Shi
• Inclusion Information : Female actors, Asian actors
• Studios : Pixar Animation Studios , Disney+
• Genre : Family and Kids
• Topics : Magic and Fantasy , Friendship , Middle School , Wild Animals
• Character Strengths : Courage , Curiosity , Empathy , Self-control , Teamwork
• Run time : 100 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG
• MPAA explanation : thematic material, suggestive content and language
• Award : Common Sense Selection
• Last updated : January 31, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Turning Red review – Pixar’s fizzing journey through female adolescence

A 13-year-old girl’s emotions take the form of a large red panda in this uplifting tale of menstruation, friendship and embracing change

T hirteen-year-old Mei Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) is just like any other high-achieving dork from a loving, slightly smothering Chinese-Canadian family. Then her hormones kick in. Like many kids at this pivotal moment, her emotions take on a life of their own. What sets Mei Lee apart is the fact that her emotions also take on a form of their own: at moments of extreme excitement (and since Mei Lee is 13, extreme excitement is the default setting), she turns into a large red panda.

Pixar’s latest, and the first feature from Domee Shi (director of the terrific short film Bao , about a sentient dumpling), Turning Red is a fizzing, squealing adolescent explosion of a movie that nails a fundamental truth about growing up. Puberty may be something that pretty much everyone has to endure, but at the time it feels like a uniquely mortifying and personal experience.

What doesn’t help Mei Lee is that, at the very moment her body takes on a mind of its own, her mother seems to lose hers. Over-protective Ming (Sandra Oh) pursues her daughter to school with armfuls of sanitary pads. And this is the gently radical core of this appealing animation: it’s that vanishingly rare thing – a piece of pop culture that not only addresses menstruation, but does so in a constructive manner.

The message is one of female friendship, embracing change and cuddling your inner panda, of working through mother-daughter friction. Here, there’s a kinship with Pixar’s Brave , but for the most part Shi visually references Japanese anime, in particular the uplifting, female-led storytelling of Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata.

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‘Turning Red’ Is Pixar’s Best Movie in Years

Though it retains the familiar magic of the legendary studio, ‘Turning Red’ stands out as a bold—and long overdue—landmark in representation

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Twenty-seven years ago, Pixar changed the world of animation with Toy Story . In the years since, the studio has masterfully crafted a wide range of computer-animated stories that allow its audiences to empathize and fall in love with the likes of rats, insects, and monsters. Pixar’s latest film, Turning Red , captures that familiar magic, while also striking out on its own in refreshing ways never seen before from the studio.

Turning Red , which became available to stream on Disney+ on Friday, is Pixar’s 25th feature film. It centers not on some fish or monster voiced by a famous comedian, nor on a male character in general—like 20 of the studio’s previous 24 films have. Rather, Turning Red follows an awkward, yet unabashedly confident 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl named Meilin Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) in early-2000s Toronto. She’s an honor student who lives to serve her parents and make them proud, especially her overbearing mother, Ming (Sandra Oh). Mei’s chief responsibility—outside of staying on her path to become U.N. Secretary-General, of course—is to help maintain the family’s temple. But Mei’s life changes in an instant when she wakes up one day as a giant red panda.

Directed and cowritten by Domee Shi in her feature-length debut, Turning Red is the first Pixar film to be solely directed by a woman. (2012’s Brave initially had Brenda Chapman at the helm, and though she retained a credit, Chapman was fired during production over “creative differences” and replaced by a man.) And unless you’re including Russell as the second lead in 2009’s Up , the movie also features the studio’s first Asian lead character. Turning Red is as hilarious as it is poignant, and it features beautiful animation along with some terrific voice acting from a diverse cast. Perhaps above all, though, the movie is fearless in its approach to focusing the story on a young Chinese Canadian girl and her three best friends as they transition into puberty, covering everything from periods to a sudden interest in boys. Turning Red may be about Mei learning to control her inner panda, a longstanding familial “inconvenience” which breaks free every time she experiences strong emotions, but it’s also a menstrual allegory—one that you wouldn’t expect to fly at the Walt Disney–owned Pixar Animation Studios.

Early in the film, a half-asleep Mei wanders into the bathroom and shocks herself awake when her reflection in the mirror reveals a massive red panda looking back at her. Moments after she screams in terror, Mei’s mother is standing outside of the bathroom door asking questions like, “Did the red peony bloom?” Ming springs into action, barging into the bathroom with a quickly assembled box of painkillers and pads, and starts her “You’re beginning to become a woman” speech. Meanwhile, Mei is cowering on the other side of the shower curtain, looking like the modern-day red Totoro. “I wanted to explore this adolescent girl going through bodily and emotional changes and her relationship with the most important person in her life, her mother,” Shi told Toronto Life . “And I wanted to combine it with the red panda, which I think is the cutest animal on the planet.”

Shi arrived at Pixar as a storyboarding intern in 2011, later rising to staff artist to work on films like Inside Out and Incredibles 2 . She initially made a splash when she became the first woman to direct a short for Pixar, with 2018’s Oscar-winning Bao . Despite the film being only eight minutes long, and without the use of a single spoken word, Bao is a bite-sized emotional journey that showcases Shi’s unique sensibilities as a storyteller. (In hindsight, it should be no surprise that the same filmmaker who crafted a story about a lonely empty-nester finding solace in a sentient dumpling would go on to create a movie like Turning Red .) The Chinese Canadian director, whose parents immigrated to Toronto from China when she was a toddler, builds on the magic of Bao in Turning Red . Drawing from her own experiences and reflections on her adolescence, community, culture, and relationship with her mother, Shi is continuing to push the boundaries at Disney and Pixar. “How do I sneak this through?” Shi thought to herself before a pitch meeting with executives at Disney. “How do I sell this and get old white men who’ve never experienced this before excited about this and wanting to, like, see more of it?”

Turning Red ’s focus on the Asian community in Toronto and a group of teenage girls who obsess over boys, especially the fictional boy band 4*Town (whose far-too-catchy music was composed by Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas O’Connell), feels unprecedented for a major animation studio like Pixar—even as the studio and Disney have made strides in representation over the past decade with multicultural stories like Big Hero 6 , Coco , Raya and the Last Dragon , Soul , and Encanto . Led by an all-female creative leadership team , with Shi and playwright Julia Cho behind the screenplay, Turning Red has an authentic touch that comes when a story is carefully crafted by those who look like and have shared experiences with the characters on screen. But even though the Turning Red team leapt a major hurdle by getting the all-important green light at Disney, appeasing a wider audience is another matter.

On Tuesday, Cinemablend managing director Sean O’Connell wrote a controversial review of Turning Red , which contained sexist and racist undertones, sending many on Twitter into a frenzy. “Without question, Turning Red is the horniest movie in Pixar history, which parents no doubt will find surprising,” O’Connell wrote in the since-deleted review. “I recognized the humor in the film, but connected with none of it. By rooting Turning Red very specifically in the Asian community of Toronto, the film legitimately feels like it was made for Domee Shi’s friends and immediate family members.” (O’Connell went even further in a tweet that accompanied the review, saying the film lacks universal appeal and has a “very narrow” target audience—while also deeming it “exhausting.”) Although this is a frustrating take considering the vast majority of Pixar’s films have been written and directed by white men and centered on male protagonists, the unfortunate truth is O’Connell probably won’t be the only one with this ignorant point of view. Rather than tearing down Turning Red , we should be celebrating it for its ability to spotlight a specific Asian culture and community whose perspectives are historically overlooked in mainstream Western media, while also maintaining a broad universal appeal to, say, anyone who’s experienced puberty. Without spoiling the specifics of it, Turning Red also features an incredible, action-packed finish that beats the endings of the vast majority of superhero movies at their own game.

Turning Red is one of the best films Pixar has made in years, and Disney’s only real mistake here is its decision to forgo a wide theatrical release, as it joins the likes of Soul and Luca as new releases given a one-way ticket to Disney+. (While I understand the pandemic isn’t over, The Batman just raked in $134 million at the North American box office in its opening weekend, and— unless Sony is attempting to pull off an elaborate April Fools’ joke —even the oft-delayed Morbius will still be hitting theaters in less than a month.) Hopefully the move to streaming will allow plenty of eyes to watch from the comfort of their homes, because Turning Red manages to share the fantastical flourishes of some of its most acclaimed predecessors while remaining as grounded as Pixar has ever been. Disney still has more than a fair share of issues to correct, but with Pixar turning to rising stars like Shi for fresh perspectives, the studio can continue to make strides and push the mainstream animation industry in the right direction.

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Turning Red celebrates awkward teen life in spectacular fashion

Transforming into a red panda is personal in Pixar’s latest

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At this point, the “Pixar movie” stereotype has become a meme : People go into the animation studio’s projects expecting a family-friendly story focused on nonhuman protagonists given surprising depth and powerful emotions. There are exceptions, but historically, Pixar has carved out this channel of storytelling for itself, then perfected it. But with a new wave of filmmakers stepping up, Pixar is breaking its own mold. 2021’s Luca is the perfect example, as a lower-key film built around subtle, understated interactions, instead of constructing big drama on the way to an emotionally shattering climax.

Turning Red , which bypasses theaters in the U.S. for Disney Plus, continues the trend. Domee Shi , who directed Pixar’s short film Bao in 2018, creates something special with this project, a deeply personal film that speaks to universal themes. With Turning Red , Shi gleefully celebrates early adolescence, a time of life often portrayed as awkward and cringey, and she revels in extensive cultural specificities that enrich the story. With a bright visual style and specific, evocative storytelling, Turning Red is an incredibly special addition to the Pixar canon, and one of its best films.

[ Ed. note: This review contains minor setup spoilers for Turning Red. ]

Turning Red follows 13-year-old Mei (Rosalie Chiang), a spunky Chinese-Canadian middle-schooler living in Toronto in the early 2000s, juggling her devotion to her mother and her duties at the family temple with her budding sense of self. After one particularly turbulent day, she wakes up and discovers that she has transformed into a giant red panda. As it turns out, every woman in her family shares this quirk — they turn into pandas when their emotions run high. Mei’s stern mother, Ming (Sandra Oh), tells her she needs to permanently contain the panda with a magical ritual, which Mei dutifully agrees to — but with a new perspective from her close friends, she begins to see the panda not as a source of embarrassment, but a source of joy. As the date of the ritual approaches, Mei is torn between what her mother wants and what she herself desires.

The triumph of Turning Red is in the way it unabashedly embraces adolescent girlhood, particularly the powerful friendships made in this time of life. Mei’s friends — deadpan Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), passionate Abby (Hyein Park), and ringleader Miriam (Ava Morse) — are all given unique and expressive designs. All-ages animation, including Pixar’s, has historically focused most on male narratives, only leaving room for one or two girls , who are often pitted against each other. It’s refreshing to see a whole cast of supportive female characters who enthusiastically lift each other up and share the same passions. Mei and her friends are superfans of the in-universe boy band 4*Town, and instead of being a focus of deprecating jokes, as boy-band fandom so often is, their enthusiasm becomes a central part of Mei forging her own identity, a source of empowerment and most of all, joy.

At the same time, Shi doesn’t depict Mei’s relationship with her mother and her ties to her family’s culture as burdens. Though Mei does feel restricted by the way her mother turns her nose up at 4*Town and embarrasses Mei in front of her crush, she still clearly loves her mom and her family. Shi renders the cultural specificities in Turning Red with such love and care (for instance, the group of older aunties who visit for the panda-control ritual, dressed in the tracksuits and brooch pins that many children of Chinese immigrants will recognize). These details extend to the emotional ties painted in Turning Red . Mei loves her mother and her family’s temple, the way she knows she’s supposed to. But she also wants to be her own person. As she’s torn between the Western values of independence and the Chinese expectations of filial piety, Mei’s inner conflict hits hard.

Much like Luca , Turning Red takes a step to the left of Pixar’s usual realistic style. The backgrounds are supersaturated in pastel colors, emulating what Shi dubs the “ Asian Tween Fever Dream ” visual style of the movie. The character designs are also pushed to be more cartoonish than typical Pixar fare, with exaggerated expressions and slapstick movement. Mei’s eyes blossom with anime-esque gigantic pupils and sparkles at various points in the movie. She and her gaggle of friends move as one unit, like the bear stack in We Bare Bears . Their personalities and interactions are all amplified and intense, designed to reflect the heightened emotions of being a teenager.

At its core, Turning Red is about Mei finding out who she is, and what that means for her relationship with her mother. It’s a deeply personal story, one Shi says was inspired by her own relationship with her mother. Like Lee Unkrich and Adrian Molina’s 2017 Pixar movie Coco before it, Turning Red is made up of specific cultural details and relationships that take on more nuanced meaning within the context of the characters’ national backgrounds. And like Coco , Turning Red still tells a universal story about growing up and claiming an identity outside of your family.

As with Bao , Shi never compromises the specificities to pander to a more general audience. Though Mei proclaims at the beginning of the film that she’s full of confidence, she spends most of its runtime growing into actually feeling that sense of self. By the end of the movie, though, she has fully embraced her individuality, and found ways to let it live alongside the other parts of her life. In that way, Turning Red feels like the result of her growth, a movie that unabashedly and jovially embraces its own identity in such a tender way that it aches.

Turning Red will be released March 11 on Disney Plus.

Turning Red Review

A hilarious, visually inspired knockout..

Turning Red will debut on Disney+ and on limited theaters on March 11, 2022.

It’s a shame that Turning Red won’t have a wide theatrical release , given its wealth of laugh- and/or cheer-out-loud moments. While Pixar’s recent output has welcomed adults with open arms — people who likely grew up watching the studio’s original films — their latest feels unapologetically in-tune with younger audiences, both narratively and aesthetically, without compromising the heart and humor that makes these movies shine. Directed by Domee Shi, whose short film Bao preceded Incredibles 2 , it’s a mile-a-minute romp set in Toronto in the early aughts, about a young Chinese Canadian teenager whose puberty brings about complications that are equal parts personal, cultural, and magical. They also result in an endearing and enjoyable story about family and friendship, with parables for growing up that are extremely on the nose (as they should be for a kids’ movie), but which arrive in the kind of inspired creative packaging that Pixar has needed for some time.

The year is 2002, and 13-year-old Meilin Lee (Rosalie Chang) has just about managed to find balance between excelling at school, spending time with her close-knit friend group, and helping her protective mother, Ming (Sandra Oh), oversee Toronto’s oldest Chinese temple. Even before we meet our spry young protagonist, her introductory voiceover comes steeped in a spunky attitude — a confidence that is tested when, one morning, she wakes up having transformed into a giant red panda. Feeling like a bloated monster, she tip-toes around Ming and her father, Jin (Orion Lee), drowning in anxious self-consciousness as she tries to navigate her changing body. However, what seems like an obvious menstruation metaphor grows delightfully complicated when Ming turns out to be less-than-surprised by Meilin’s transformations, which appear to be triggered by intense emotions. As it turns out, this particular problem runs in the family.

The stakes of Turning Red are both smaller and more personal than you might expect. Meilin’s predicament no doubt drives the familial conflict, as her mother tries to help her keep it under wraps (and keep her feelings bottled up, lest she Hulk out). However, this tension soon becomes entwined with a story of Meilin and her three best friends trying to see their favorite boy band live in concert, a scenario that both clashes with Meilin’s unpredictable changes, and ties a neat bow on themes that get rightfully messy, between the lofty expectations of an immigrant family, navigating a mother-daughter relationship (at a time when it’s sure to become more fraught), being conditioned to keep your emotions in check as a teenage girl, and growing up alongside pals who are just as confused and hormonal as you are.

After a while, Meilin’s red panda alter ego comes to represent all these things and more, but the film is never overwhelmed by its litany of allegories. This is owed largely to its crystal-clear visual approach, which makes each moment (and each metaphor) marvelously fun. Where recent Pixar films like The Good Dinosaur , Soul , and Toy Story 4 have skewed towards more realistic environments, and toward tactile direction that impersonates physical camera work, Turning Red injects the studio’s usual computer-generated aesthetic with a hyper-charged anime approach, between crash-zooms that heighten emotions — at a time in the characters’ lives when each new feeling of anger or attraction feels like an uncontrollable rush — and sparkling eyes that keep the focus squarely, and amusingly, on Meilin and her friends’ romantic crushes.

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The character details are just as delightful. Meilin’s friend group is diverse, not just ethnically, but also when it comes to their designs and personalities. There’s her sardonic South Asian pal Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) who speaks more with her body language than her expressions. There’s her short, hyper-active Korean buddy Abby (Hyein Park), who practically bounces off the walls. And then there’s her lanky white best friend Miriam (Ava Morse), who has a longer parental leash than her three Asian comrades, but who seems to understand Meilin just a tiny bit better than the others (as with any friend dynamic, you have your best friends, but you also have your “best” best friend). They’re all perfectly awkward for a story of 13-year-old girls, each with wildly different heights and body types, but they all fit together perfectly as a group, and their insecurities seem to melt away when they’re together.

They also dress in distinct, bright, primary colors that allow them to stand out in most scenes, which makes them resemble the various anthropomorphic emotions in Inside Out (on which Shi was a story artist), though this connection may not be accidental. Not only do Meilin’s friends calm her down (and occasionally fire her up), but Turning Red bears a key thematic resemblance to Pete Docter’s 2015 film as well: it’s as much about the physical pressures of growing up as it is about reconciling and making room for complicated, contradictory, and unpleasant emotions as well.

Just as detailed as Meilin’s friend group are her family dynamics. Her understanding (and understated) father Jin has slightly more of a Chinese accent than Ming, who seems to be more concerned with assimilating than he is; this is also one of the reasons Ming hopes to keep Meilin’s panda problem under wraps, given its cultural origins, and the way it could be perceived by non-Chinese characters (she rarely seems to give Meilin’s friends enough credit). However, the specifics of their mother-daughter dynamic are perhaps what shine the most. The two characters have noticeably different designs — Ming is much more prim and proper — but when the film begins, their conversations and even their body movements mirror one another. This sets up a story in which they become each other’s reflections in both overt and subtle ways as they eventually fall out of sync, and as Meilin faces trials her mother once had to face as well. Another touching detail is the fact that Ming’s nickname for Meilin is “Mei Mei,” which also happens to be a Chinese honorific for a younger sister; while their parent-child dynamic is no doubt tested, so is their bond of friendship, and their sense of loving, mutual support.

All of this would be bog-standard, both as a kiddie outing and as a tale of immigrant-first gen culture clash, were it not for how every moment seems to shoot for the stars. While the more muted and realistic scenes are reserved for a few painfully quiet emotional moments, most of the film charges forward with a slapstick, Looney Tune energy that comes occasionally drenched in the vivid hues of a ’90s Disney dream (or nightmare) sequence. Ludwig Göransson’s score is dynamic and playful, and even helps tell its own story by stringing together western pop and traditional Chinese influences, which culminates in unexpected ways during Turning Red’s raucous, hilarious, and pulsating climax.

Disney+ Spotlight: March 2022

Every dramatic transition has its own zippy lighting cue, which makes the film a joke-filled ride, but its visual gags always enhance the tension and emotions rather than undercutting them. A group of Meilin’s aunties, who enter the story at a pivotal time, arrive like Hollywood movie stars drenched in floodlights, while the attractive boy band sensation 4-Town — a reflection of early 2000s pop, but with a Korean member to place them in today’s zeitgeist — are practically angels accompanied by divine sunlight. Even Meilin’s outbursts warp the entire fabric of the film around her, since she begins to see herself as a beastly inconvenience, unworthy of taking up space, until her friends and family convince her otherwise.

Most of all, it’s a movie that’s frank about the most awkward moments of puberty, from embarrassment over burgeoning sexuality, to inexplicable anger, to dealing with bodily insecurity, which it turns into lively and imaginative scenes at every turn. There’s never a dull moment in Turning Red, both because Shi and co-writer Julia Cho lace each beat and interaction with layers of meaning, and because the whole thing comes wrapped in cartoon influences that value expression above realism, which is something modern Hollywood animation occasionally forgets.

A story of magical transformation as a metaphor for personal and cultural change, Turning Red (from Bao director Domee Shi) is Pixar’s funniest and most imaginative film in years. It captures the wild energy of adolescence, uses pop stars as a timeless window into puberty, and tells a tale of friendship and family in the most delightfully kid-friendly way.

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‘Turning Red’: Pixar Tackles Puberty and Gives Us One for the Ages, Period.

By Jessica Kiang

Jessica Kiang

What’s your favorite euphemism for menstruation? Personally, I’ve always liked the daftness of “having the painters in,” and the evocative imagery of “shark week.” Maybe you “surf the crimson tide” (actually, has anyone said that since the mid 1990s?) or, more quaintly, endure a “visit from Aunt Flo.” Perhaps you are of the stricter feminist school of thought that dictates all such metaphorical language contributes to the stigmatization of this very natural process, and you confine yourself to starkly clinical terms involving blood, progesterone and the uterine lining. Or maybe, like Ming, the elegantly tigerish Toronto mom voiced by Sandra Oh in Domee Shi’s delightfully personal, perky animated coming-of-age movie Turning Red , you are of a more poetic bent, and tentatively inquire of your tween daughter, who has locked herself in the bathroom in a fit of mortification: “Has the red peony blossomed?”

Inside that bathroom, 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian Mei (Rosalie Chiang) has not experienced anything as delicate in the downstairs department as a flower unfurling its pretty petals. Instead, under the influence of hormones, humiliation and an old family blessing/curse she was unaware of, Mei has turned into a Portacabin-sized ailurus fulgens, i.e. the red panda that’s the emblem of her Chinese ancestors. A rambunctiously self-confident dork who aces her academics by day and works in the temple the family runs as a tourist attraction by evening, she has until now managed to balance her worlds. But between honoring her parents and kicking it with a tight crew of schoolfriends — Miriam (Ava Morse), Abby (Hyein Park) and Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) — even a girl as boundlessly, often annoyingly, energetic as Mei has trouble living up to everyone’s expectations. It wouldn’t take much to throw it all out of whack, and Mei gets a lot. She gets puberty .

Suddenly she’s doodling pictures of herself in compromising clinches with the boy in the local grocery store, and creating fantasy scenarios, along with her friends, involving her favorite boy band. 4*Town — inexplicably a five-piece — is just one of the things that Turning Red gets so very right, managing to parody the manufactured wholesomeness of the boy-band phenomenon, while remaining deeply fond and appreciative of the service they perform in channeling the fantasies of young girls at a vulnerable stage of emotional development. And it’s elevated by a couple of very plausible-sounding 4*Town hits, written by Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell, that are catchy enough to be convincing, but just insipid enough to be amusing (see the lyric, “Had friends and I’ve had buddies, it’s true/But they don’t turn my tummy the way you do”).

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It’s a little astonishing that this is Pixar ‘s first-ever feature solely directed by a woman. On the other hand, it’s hard not to be a little glad that the honor, late though it is, has fallen to Domee Shi, previously an Oscar-winner for the weird and witty animated short Bao, in which a steamed bun became a stand-in child for a mother suffering from empty-nest syndrome. On a similarly intimate canvas, where many recent Pixar hits have spun out into complex, metaphysical explorations of the afterlife ( Coco ) or the before-life ( Soul ) or the inner life ( Inside Out ), Turning Red is much like its pint-sized protagonist and goes proudly, loudly smaller, while still having the confidence and the smarts to poof at will into a bright red metaphor for the elation and confusion of coming-of-age.

The early-2000s Toronto setting, wherein the city itself is flattered by the neon-and-pastel color scheme, allows Shi and co-writer Julia Cho to embellish an essentially straightforward story with all sorts of lovingly observed, insidery details: the noughties fashions, the tamagotchi craze, the ancestor-worship traditions Ming upholds, the genuinely mouthwatering food-prep scenes courtesy of Mei’s quiet, kindly dad (Orion Lee). And even if the character design does not feel particularly new for Pixar doing its “real-world” schtick, the faces seem to have reached new heights of expressivity and subtlety, while the choreography — so crisp in its comic timing — has to be some of the best the animation giant has ever delivered. It does make it a bit of a shame that Turning Red is going straight to streaming, especially come the ridiculous stadium-set finale in which scale is of the essence.

But the comparative simplicity of the story, which involves Mei learning to manage her new ailurine alter-ego while also desperately trying to get to the 4*Town concert of which her mother so vehemently disapproves, is also deceptive of the many ways that the strikingly silly central image — a teenage girl suddenly floofing into a gigantic, fluffy, somewhat smelly red panda — can work. En route to a hardly unexpected moral about embracing your inner weirdo, and learning the difference between self-control and self-repression, the panda becomes a potent cultural allegory too. This is especially true for later-generation Asian immigrant kids, whose challenges in balancing traditional values and contemporary environment are significantly different even to those of their parents, but it’s representative of the generational divide in much broader terms as well. The panda is, after all, a conduit for Mei to reconnect with her mother (and all her female relatives), during a ritual that gives them, of all things, a Petite Maman moment.

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And somehow, at the same time, Shi also finds space in this zany, zippy adventure to big up teen-girl friendships: Miriam, Abby and the very subtly gay-coded Priya play a satisfyingly supportive role (as a gang, if not so much individually) in helping Mei understand that being a person with a panda inside might not be such a shameful thing after all. Turning Red is definitely a persuasive manifesto for “releasing the Red Panda” to be added to that list of menstruation euphemisms, but that’s not all it is. It is also a bright, moving, funny, happy film about adolescent angst, that doesn’t condescend but also doesn’t overload. It is, perhaps most remarkably, a movie about 13-year-olds that 13-year-olds might actually enjoy.

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Turning Red review: Pixar grows up, gets panda'd in its joyful tween-centered latest

A 13-year-old girl discovers her furry family secret in a breezy-smart coming-of-age charmer.

Leah Greenblatt is the critic at large at Entertainment Weekly , covering movies, music, books, and theater. She is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, and has been writing for EW since 2004.

Has there ever been a better metaphor for puberty than a feral, rampaging animal? Like other teen wolves before her, Meilin Lee, voiced by Rosalie Chiang, can't help manifesting her feelings literally in claws and fur. Unlike them, the small hormonal heroine of Turning Red (on Disney+ March 11) has the full imaginirium of Pixar behind her — not perhaps the studio anyone expected to be speaking directly to crushes, periods, and parents who just don't understand, though a project like Red seems almost inevitable now that it's here. Their audience, after all, is continuously growing up; why shouldn't their movies?

For reasons that go unexplained (maybe it's to eliminate the specter of social media and cell phones), the story is set in 2002 Toronto, where Mei, bespectacled and freshly 13, lives with her constantly hovering mother Ming ( Sandra Oh ) and more amiable father Jin (Orion Lee) in a courtyard complex that also houses one of the city's oldest temples. Ming is a classic tiger mom, but Mei doesn't seem to mind; she loves studying and getting good grades and helping to prepare the temple for visitors. She also loves her friends, a motley crew mildly perplexed by her good-girl loyalties.

For Mei, honoring her parents has simply never come into question: "They're the supreme beings who gave you life …. The least you can do in return is every single thing they ask." But there are forces simmering beyond her control, and when Ming brusquely shuts down her plea to see her favorite dreamboat boy band in concert and then inadvertently humiliates her in front of a leering group of classmates, Mei's ancestral DNA takes over. It turns out that some form of red-panda transmogrification is a family legacy, and whenever Mei feels too much — anxiety, excitement, rage — she pandas all over the place.

Body-swap shenanigans inevitably ensue, and Red revels in the chance to show off its various Pixar tricks: The original songs, by Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas, are high-gloss earworms, and the script, by Julia Cho ( Big Love , Halt and Catch Fire ) and director Domee Shi sparkles and zips. Small details gleam from the corners — the rippling beta-carotene richness of each furry panda filament; the excitable sidekick (Hyein Park) so tightly wound that even her affirmations come out like a WWE scream. Like last year's Raya and the Last Dragon and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, though, the movie is maybe most notable for how naturally it forefronts and celebrates Asian culture, and the easy equality with which it treats its female characters.

Shi, who won an Oscar in 2019 for her animated short Bao , is actually the first solo woman to helm a Pixar feature, which may be why its portrayal of girlhood on the verge feels as true as it does, even as a cartoon; she captures the tsunami of heightened feelings that makes everything matter so much in adolescence, without judging or making fun. She also roots Mei's story engagingly in family ritual — the Lees hand-shaping dumplings for dinner or lighting incense for their ancestors as a matter of course, not calculated exoticism or lesson-teaching. The story can be silly and sometimes vaguely anachronistic (did the kids really exclaim "Oh.Em.Gee." or speak in the confident parlance of self-actualized TikTok teens back in 2002?), but Red is so breezily charming that hardly matters. In the tricky world of tween-dom, it captures something sweetly universal: Growing up is messy, no matter how you bear it. Grade: B+

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Turning Red

A thirteen-year-old girl named Mei Lee is torn between staying her mother's dutiful daughter and the changes of adolescence. And as if the challenges were not enough, whenever she gets overl... Read all A thirteen-year-old girl named Mei Lee is torn between staying her mother's dutiful daughter and the changes of adolescence. And as if the challenges were not enough, whenever she gets overly excited she transforms into a giant red panda. A thirteen-year-old girl named Mei Lee is torn between staying her mother's dutiful daughter and the changes of adolescence. And as if the challenges were not enough, whenever she gets overly excited she transforms into a giant red panda.

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• Rosalie Chiang
• 1.1K User reviews
• 9 Critic reviews
• 83 Metascore
• 10 wins & 91 nominations total

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• Robaire (4*Town)

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• Trivia The number 4 is considered unlucky in Chinese culture; it sounds similar to the word for "death" in both Mandarin and Cantonese.
• Goofs Lester B. Pearson Middle School has a sign for Canadian Indigenous People's History Month. It's actually called National Indigenous History Month, and it was first observed in 2009.

Ming : The farther you go, the prouder I'll be.

• Crazy credits At the end of the credits, a brief scene is shown revealing Jin, Mei's father, being a closeted 4*Town fan.
• Alternate versions When the audio track is set to English (UK) on Disney+, Lauren's voice is re-dubbed by Anne-Marie.
• Connections Featured in AniMat's Crazy Cartoon Cast: Turning Red for the Brawl (2021)
• Soundtracks 1 True Love Music and Lyrics by Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell Performed by 4*Town ( Jordan Fisher , Josh Levi , Topher Ngo , Finneas O'Connell and Grayson Villanueva ) Japanese version performed by Da-iCE Produced by Finneas O'Connell Recorded by David Boucher Mixed by Rob Kinelski Vocal arrangements by Finneas O'Connell and David Giuli

User reviews 1.1K

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• Apr 30, 2022
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• March 11, 2022 (United States)
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• Toronto, Ontario, Canada (on location)
• Walt Disney Pictures
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• $175,000,000 (estimated)
• Feb 11, 2024
• $21,813,358

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• Runtime 1 hour 40 minutes
• Dolby Atmos

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‘Turning Red’ Review: Beware the Red-Furred Monster

A 13-year-old girl becomes a red panda when she loses her cool in Domee Shi’s heartwarming but wayward coming-of-age film.

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By Maya Phillips

A quirky Asian teenager transforms into a giant red panda whenever she gets excited … even the premise gives me pause. Which makes the task of reviewing the new Disney/Pixar film “Turning Red” (on Disney+ March 11) especially tricky. Because that’s the idea behind this sometimes heartwarming but wayward coming-of-age movie, which toes the line between truthfully representing a Chinese family, flaws and all, and indulging stereotypes.

Meilin Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) is a typical 13-year-old girl: She dances, has crushes on boys and has a cohort of weird but loyal besties who share her obsession with the glossy-lipped members of the boy band 4*Town. She’s also Chinese Canadian, living in Toronto in 2002, where her family maintains a temple. There she helps her loving but overbearing mother, Ming (Sandra Oh), and tries to be the perfect daughter — even when that means burying her own thoughts and desires in the process. This becomes a lot more difficult when she goes through her changes — not of the period variety, but the panda kind.

The character writing and design are where “Turning Red,” directed by Domee Shi , most succeeds. Mei has the relatable swagger of the middle school cool nerd — she’s creative and confident, and also has a perfect report card. The tomboy skater girl Miriam, the deadpan Priya and the hilariously fiery Abby form a funky trifecta of gal pals who are Mei’s emotional safety net. And Ming strikes an impressive balance between dictatorial and doting, dismissing Mei’s friends and interests but also stalking her at school to ply her with steamed buns.

Shi finds subtle yet effective ways to illustrate the personalities of even the ancillary characters, from the stiffly applied makeup of Mei’s grandmother (Ho-Wai Ching) to the flamboyant open-toed footwear of the gang of aunties who follow Grandma Lee around. And the animation of Mei’s hair in her panda form — how it lays flat when she’s calm or spikes upward when she’s mad — reinforces her emotional shifts.

It’s no surprise that these kinds of expressions are where Shi’s direction most shines; as in her 2018 Oscar-winning Pixar short “Bao,” “Turning Red” lives and breathes on the complex emotional relationship between a mother and a child preparing to leave the nest. And also as in “Bao,” in which a mother raises a steamed bun child from birth to adulthood, here again Shi uses a culturally specific metaphor to convey her characters’ emotions.

This is where “Turning Red” gets sticky: Though the plot’s red panda magic is rooted in its characters’ cultural traditions (the Lees honor an ancestor who defended her family with the power of a red panda), these details aren’t enough to absolve the film of its kid-friendly version of exoticism. After all, its characters profit off Mei’s cute and foreign transformation.

And when it comes down to the movie’s conflict, the antagonists are the women in Mei’s family. Or, more accurately, the suffocating cultural traditions and familial expectations that are embodied by the women. The fact that Mei’s grandmother gets the kind of shady introductory scene that you’d expect of the head honcho in a mobster flick, and that these women share the red panda affliction, means they fall into a formula of cold, emotionless Asian women. Is the film tackling the stereotype or fulfilling it? The line is too blurry to tell. By the end, a bit of understanding, empathy and a pandapocalypse reassures us that the stoic Asian dames aren’t the source of the problem but also victims, like Mei. Though I wonder what the movie would look like if the conflict wasn’t enacted solely in the form of these women.

“Turning Red” offers satisfying morsels despite its messiness, like the few throwbacks to the early aughts, including Tamagotchis and pre-BTS boy band mania. (4*Town’s criminally catchy songs, written by Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas O’Connell, are perfect reproductions of 2000s pop hits.)

It’s too bad that “Turning Red” fumbles its storytelling, because at the very least it has fun when it lets its fur fly.

Turning Red Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Disney+.

Maya Phillips is a critic at large. She is the author of the poetry collection “Erou” and “NERD: Adventures in Fandom From This Universe to the Multiverse,” forthcoming from Atria Books. More about Maya Phillips

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Turning Red Has No Obligations

For all that we measure out recognition in pangs, the experience of seeing some fragment of yourself onscreen is usually assumed to be a positive one. But the rush of familiarity brought on by Domee Shi’s 2018 short, Bao, made me feel bad in ways I struggled to articulate. I welled up from almost the first frame: The eight-minute film, about a Chinese Canadian empty nester channeling her feelings about her estranged son into an anthropomorphic dumpling, is astonishingly efficient at extracting tears. But I resented as much as admired that effectiveness. It’s hard not to begrudge something that shows you what an easy mark you are when it comes to diasporic pain points so classic as to also be clichés — the controlling first-generation mother, the rebellious Westernized kid, the guilt, the sacrifice, the disappointment.

When hashing out that ambivalence with friends, we found ourselves comparing Bao ’s protagonist to our respective mothers (Chinese, Chinese by way of Singapore, Japanese by way of Peru), and then wondering why we needed to, aside from that the film was burdened by representing various firsts — first Pixar production centered on an Asian woman, first Pixar short from a woman director. Maybe it’s that the simplicity of Bao (which, like most of the animation giant’s shorts, is wordless) gave it the feeling of a fable that we were supposed to take ownership of, whether those were its intentions or not. One friend bristled at how terminally second-gen it is to envision an immigrant matriarch so devoted to her son that her life revolves around him, even in his absence. And yet despite her complaints, the startling pivot point in Bao ’s parent-child allegory stuck with her. Months later, she couldn’t help but reach for it when describing an acquaintance’s situation with his own mother: “She ate him! ”

She was talking about the scene in which, in a panic over being left behind by her surrogate child the way she was by her human one, the mother in Bao gobbles down the adorable food baby rather than let him walk away from her. It’s disturbing and it’s the absolute highlight, the moment when it becomes clear that Shi is interested in making something darker and stranger than Subtle Asian Traits: The Animated Movie, and it feels like that seed from which Shi’s new movie was grown. Turning Red is her feature debut, and it’s the best thing Pixar has released in years. While it’s once again about a Chinese Canadian mother and child, it’s neither dutiful in its treatment of them nor loaded down by obligations to meet the impossible expectations of a whole disparate demographic of viewers. Effervescent and ridiculous and grounded in a pastel-shaded Toronto and the nearby throwback details of 2002, it has texture and specificity to spare, and the only person it cares to speak on behalf of is its 13-year-old heroine, Meilin Lee (Rosalie Chiang).

Mei is an unabashed dork who loves Canada; her grade-eight crew of Miriam (Ava Morse), Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), and Abby (Hyein Park); the boy band 4*Town; and her parents Ming (Sandra Oh) and Jin Lee (Orion Lee), though her suffocatingly close relationship with her helicoptering mother is more complicated than she’s willing to acknowledge. She also loves herself, at least until she unexpectedly transforms into a giant red panda one night. She has come into her matrilineal inheritance, a blessing passed down from a distant warrior ancestor that has in modern times become, as Ming carefully phrases it, “an inconvenience.” The panda, which emerges whenever Mei experiences strong emotions, is an unmistakable stand-in for puberty — curvier, hairier, and muskier, though admittedly standard adolescence doesn’t also usually include growing a tail. This new animalistic side arrives alongside an eruption of teen hormones that has her gawping at a Bieber-banged classmate and furiously doodling sketches of herself in a clinch with the local mini-mart clerk.

The beautiful weirdness of Mei’s nascent sexuality — she enjoys drawing her favorite 4*Town member as a merman — makes the inevitable arrival of shame into her life all the more painful. It’s not the panda’s fault. The panda, fluffy and free, represents Mei at her most unfettered, dancing up a storm and posing for pictures and serving as the life of the party once Mei and her friends figure out that they can monetize Mei’s metamorphosis to buy 4*Town tickets. The shame comes from Ming. She had it instilled in her by Mei’s even more iron-willed grandmother, who eventually shows up with a battalion of aunties for a ceremony meant to seal Mei’s inner beast away forever. There’s a core of raw, unresolved generational hurt in Turning Red , in the way that Mei feels trapped by her mother’s hopes and dreams for her, and the way that Ming harbors tamped-down resentment about never feeling good enough for her own mother, a pattern she couldn’t help repeating. But the movie isn’t interested in staging a battle in which Eastern values are neatly pitted against Western permissiveness.

What Turning Red wants for its characters is only to carve out a space in which being a good daughter doesn’t require an erasure of self. In doing that, it allows Ming — hovering outside Mei’s school, waiting to watch Mandarin-language dramas with her at night — to be not some Tiger Mom incarnate, but a woman who has made her child her best friend and who is terrified of being lonely when that child embarks on a life of her own. Representation can be an awfully flimsy thing to invest in, as Pixar’s parent company, Disney, has handily demonstrated in funding the backers of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill while touting its “diverse stories” as being “more powerful than any tweet or lobbying effort.” The thrill of Turning Red is the way its characters feel neither typecast nor actively at war with type. They simply are a goofball kid and a fearsome but fearful adult trying to figure out how their relationship will grow with time rather than calcify into something brittle and broken.

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Turning Red Review

11 Mar 2022

Turning Red

In so many ways, Pixar’s Turning Red — the feature debut from Domee Shi, the filmmaker behind Oscar-winning short Bao — is all about asserting a renewed identity. Chinese-Canadian almost-teen Meilin (Rosalie Chiang), aka Mei, has an assured sense of self, right from the off; she’s an unapologetically dorky academic achiever who loves playing the flute, feeding her Tamagotchi, and pining over boyband 4*Town (sample song: ‘Girl, I Love Your Jeans’). But as puberty — and an additional spiritual transformation — rears its head, she changes; some of the old Mei is left behind, but the new Mei is a blast.

Shi’s film offers a new identity for Pixar, too. For once, this is not a buddy movie. It’s not an adventure flick either, resolutely a coming-of-age story from start to finish. The Ludwig Göransson score thrums and flutters like only a Ludwig score can. And the distinct visual style — incorporating anime speed-lines, face-filter emoji reactions, and a defiantly tween-girl pastel-pink sparkly sheen — means it looks unlike anything the studio has done before. Turning Red not only keeps Mei’s experiences and emotions at the heart of the story; the entire film feels like it’s filtered through her personality: ebullient and energetic and irresistible.

In typical Pixar style, Turning Red ’s premise offers instinctual simplicity and wild invention. Pitched somewhere between Eighth Grade , The Incredible Hulk and Scott Pilgrim , it externalises Mei’s inner transformation into an allegory for bodily changes and evolving interpersonal relationships. Overnight, she goes from parents’ delight to literal raging hormone monster: when her magnified feelings of embarrassment, joy and anger manifest, she blows up into a giant red panda. For all the metaphors at play, Shi doesn’t shy away from the specific realities of teen girlhood either, with a frankness that would be refreshing in any movie, let alone a Pixar one — during Mei’s first transformation, she hides in the bathroom, her mother Ming ( Sandra Oh ) handing her sanitary pads as she assumes “the red peony” has bloomed.

The extraordinary finale offers an exquisite blend of spectacle and sentiment.

Turning Red isn’t just direct; it’s frequently unexpected, too. Most tellings of this story might involve Mei trying to keep the panda secret. Instead, Shi’s film is more about how Mei chooses to own this new side of herself, exploring the ways it impacts her relationship with her mum and her trio of ride-or-die besties, Miriam (Ava Morse), Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Abby (Hyein Park — a comedic standout).

Compared to the livewire opening half-hour, Turning Red ’s middle act drags a little, pacing-wise, but the extraordinary finale offers an exquisite blend of spectacle and sentiment. While a climactic pop-concert kaiju battle (with pitch-perfect early-’00s pastiche songs penned by Billie Eilish and Finneas) offers real cinematic thrills, the moments that linger longest are the emotionally charged conversations and quieter personal revelations. Behind the burly exterior, the final reel is ultimately a dialogue between generations of Asian women — one which posits that the forces of familial love, self-acceptance and inherited destiny are as powerful as any boyband anthem. Long live the new Pixar.

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• Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Summary Mei Lee (voice of Rosalie Chiang) is a confident, dorky 13-year-old torn between staying her mother’s dutiful daughter and the chaos of adolescence. Her protective, if not slightly overbearing mother, Ming (voice of Sandra Oh), is never far from her daughter—an unfortunate reality for the teenager. And as if changes to her interests, rel ... Read More

Directed By : Domee Shi

Written By : Julia Cho, Sarah Streicher, Domee Shi

Where to Watch

Rosalie chiang, meilin, panda meilin.

Ming, Panda Ming, Young Ming

Maitreyi ramakrishnan, wai ching ho, grandma, grandma panda, tristan allerick chen.

Lori Tan Chinn

Auntie chen, sherry cola, lillian lim, auntie ping.

Jordan Fisher

Robaire (4*town), finneas o'connell, jesse (4*town), aaron t. (4*town), grayson villanueva, tae young (4*town).

Aaron Z. (4*Town)

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Turning Red

• Animation , Comedy , Kids , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

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In Theaters

• February 7, 2024
• Rosalie Chiang as Meilin "Mei" Lee; Sandra Oh as Ming Lee; Ava Morse as Miriam; Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as Priya; Hyein Park as Abby; Orion Lee as Jin Lee; Wai Ching Ho as Grandmother; James Hong as Mr. Gao; Tristan Allerick Chen as Tyler; Addie Chandler as Devon

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• March 11, 2022

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Movie review.

Adolescence is hard.

That’s no secret, of course. Why, adolescence itself is almost like an anti-secret—filled with all sorts of embarrassing things you’d rather just lock away. You grow what seems to be several feet taller in, like, about a second. You start growing hair in weird places. You sprout a tail. Your body odor ratchets up a notch or two. You—

Oh, wait. You mean to tell me that you didn’t sprout a tail when you were an adolescent? Well, consider yourself lucky. Mei is here to tell you that growing tails—or anything else more at home on a red panda—is no picnic.

Mei, a 13-year-old girl of Chinese descent and Canadian citizenship, never asked to transform into a gigantic red panda. In fact, she never knew the option was on the table. Her main concerns were keeping her grades up, keeping her love of boy band 4-Town strong and keeping her mom proud of her. And a little touch of puberty wasn’t going to stop her from performing her scholarly/friendly/daughterly duties to the letter.

But it seems as though her mom has been keeping a secret from Mei.

While most kids have to navigate cracking voices and oily skin in adolescence, Mei’s family takes puberty to a whole new level. Long ago, one of Mei’s ancestors made a bargain with the gods: Help me protect the village from rampaging attackers ! She prayed. The gods granted her the ability to transform into a gigantic red panda, which did the trick.

But the gods, apparently having a rather twisted sense of humor, gave this gift a catch: All the women in the family thereafter would be able to turn into pandas, too—a neat ability in feudal China, but less ideal in urban Toronto. And the transformation itself can be a bit tricky. The panda comes out when emotions run high. And given that adolescence is a time of sky-high emotionalism … well, let’s just say that his magical red panda is about the only panda that’s not endangered.

But that’s not all. Mei’s mom, Ming Lee, warns her daughter that the panda comes with a dark side. As such, most of the women (Ming Lee included) have undergone a special ceremony that has separated the women from their panda alter-egos. Mei can—and will—do the same, once the full moon makes an appearance.

It can’t happen soon enough. Whether it’s the panda’s “dark side” or something else, Mei’s not quite thinking like herself these days. She’s angrier. More prone to lash out. She sometimes lies to her beloved family. Sneak behind their backs. Think about boys , and not just the members of 4-Town.

Mei’s not the sweet little girl she used to be. She’s part panda now. And the panda wants to come out.

Positive Elements

Turning Red is an in-your-face metaphor for puberty and all the changes that go along with it. As we’ll see, the film tackles those changes straight on, without a blink or a flinch. And it reminds us that while adolescence can feel strange or even monstrous at times, it’s a normal and even beautiful transformation.

The movie also understands how difficult adolescence can be for both kids and parents. The dynamics between the two are changing, and how both parties navigate those changes can impact relationships for a long time to come. (We see that Ming Lee doesn’t have a particularly close relationship with her own mother, and Ming Lee’s own transformation was to blame for that.)

Mei loves her own family very much. Certainly, her relationship with her mom faces strains during the film, but the underlying affection remains.

But—again, a nod toward what happens to most of us during adolescence—she’s deeply and increasingly committed to her friends: Miriam, Priya and Abby. With the exception of a late plot hiccup or two, the four of them support one another unwaveringly. They’re the center of Mei’s life, really—and as such, it’s perhaps no surprise they help center her , too. When Mei discovers that peace and calm can banish her panda self for a time, Mei thinks of her friends to conjure that sense of serenity.

Spiritual Elements

Ming Lee leads tours of her family temple for visitors, with Mei serving as “its assistant temple keeper.” Mei tells us that there, “instead of honoring a god, we honor our ancestors,” and mother and daughter light incense as they kneel before a portrait of one of them.

That revered ancestor (Sun Yee) is called the “Guardian of the Red Pandas.” Before we know about the family gift/curse, we know that Sun Yee sacrificed herself for others, and that the red panda “blessed” the family. (It’s only later, when Mei goes through her transformation, that we’re told the gods bestowed this magical “blessing” on the family.) We sometimes see flashbacks or visions of sorts of supernatural red pandas flying about, sometimes smiting their enemies.

The separation ceremony feels quite magical as well: A circle is drawn around the person who would be separated from her panda-self. Others stand around the circle and chant. (We’re told the music and the chanting could be anything, as long as it comes from “the heart,” but Mei’s family is made up of traditionalists who chant what sound like magic incantations.) And if the spell ceremony works as it should, a glowing symbol or rune of some sort appears in the circle as well.

[ Spoiler Warning ] While the ceremony separates supernatural panda essences from their mortal human cohorts, the panda parts of them don’t go away: Rather, they’re housed in various objects—often pieces of jewelry—that the mortal human then keeps on her person.

Members of 4-Town arrive, decked out as angels. We see people dressed in ways that would indicate other religions, including a Sikh dastar and a Muslim hijab. We hear that someone has “50 years of experience as a shaman.”

Sexual Content

Mei and her friends are deeply infatuated with the five members of 4-Town, and we hear Mei and her friends talk about how they might date and marry and settle down with the bandmates. (They discover one of their male friends has an affinity for the band, too—crying along with all the tween girls when the group takes the stage during a concert. Read into that what you will.)

But Mei’s also starting to feel attractions for boys closer to home. She begins doodling pictures of Devon, one such would-be crush: The first drawing we see depicts him apparently shirtless, holding Mei in an embrace. Another picture features him as a merman—complete with tail. We don’t see any other drawings, but when her mom looks at them, she’s appalled. “Did he do these things to you?!” she asks, horrified. She then marches down to the convenience store (where the boy works) and demands, “What have you done to my Mei Mei?!” Devon’s done nothing, of course; in fact, he doesn’t even know her name.

Meanwhile, Mei’s equally as horrified by what she drew. “What we you thinking, drawing those things?!” she scolds herself. “Those horrible, awful, sexy things!” But it’s not the last time that Mei fantasizes about a boy in a fish tail. We see part of one of her mer-fantasies, which is strong enough to trigger her panda transformation.

Mei and her friends flirt with some middle school boys. Mei expresses a desire to dance somewhat suggestively—shaking her rear end and such—much to her mother’s horror. Her mom scolds other kids, too. “Where are your parents?” she says to some unseen targets. “Put some clothes on!” We see a guy shirtless.

Another sensitive subject that Turning Red alludes to repeatedly, and one that is related to reproduction and anatomy (which is why we’ve included it in this section), is menstruation. When a panda-tized Mei, hides in the bathroom, her mother assumes that’s the issue: She asks Mei, “Did the red peony bloom?” We also see and hear references to menstrual pads. Mei’s mom also talks with her about the importance of “protect[ing] your petals and start cleaning them regularly.” We hear references to cramps. And some might hear an echo of menstruation in the film’s title.

Violent Content

Ming Lee cautions Mei that their spirit-pandas come with a “dark side,” and we do see Mei transform into a panda when she becomes enraged. At one point, Mei’s arm clicks into panda mode and hurls a rubber dodgeball through a school window.

Mei’s parents even move her into a furniture-less bedroom until it’s time for the transformation ceremony. (We see claw marks on the walls and floors, presumably from Mei in her transformed state.) But even when the panda isn’t a product of violent anger, its mere size can cause problems: She causes plenty of property damage in said form.

A massive arena suffers some massive damage. Someone’s kicked in the shins. People wrestle a bit. Supernatural animals fight and bite. Mom and Mei watch a Chinese show, and Mom mentions that one of the characters will likely be stabbed on his wedding night.

Crude or Profane Language

Two uses of “crap” and two uses of the initials “O-M-G.” We also hear plenty of other crude insults tossed about, too.

Drug and Alcohol Content

When Ming Lee believes that Devon’s been untoward toward her daughter, she says that he’s what happens “when you don’t wear sunblock and do drugs all day.”

Other Negative Elements

Mei starts acting in some un-Mei-like ways, and I don’t mean just turning into a panda. When her mother refuses to let her go to a concert, Mei decides she’s going to go anyway—and she spends much of the rest of the movie lying and hiding things from her parents. We learn that her grades have started to slip, too. And later, throws her friends under the metaphorical bus to keep from getting in trouble with her mom.

We hear references to constipation and body odor.

Ever since Pixar rolled out the landmark classic Toy Story , the studio has been known for telling some of the best cinematic stories of the age. And while Pixar’s movies are technically for kids, those labels can obscure the beauty, depth and resonance of the films themselves.

Up is an astounding and affecting rumination on grief. Inside Out does nothing less than unpack the human psyche. Not every Pixar film has been a home run. Some have had their own issues. But generally, from Finding Nemo to The Incredibles , from WALL-E to Soul , Pixar films have generally pulled off a rare double achievement—offering audiences of all ages beautiful messages beautifully told.

Even Brave —not considered among Pixar’s best—bravely jumped headlong into the ticklish family dynamics between a demanding mother and headstrong girl and found some fertile middle ground therein. In the movie, Mom realized that she couldn’t turn daughter Merida into someone she was never born to be. But Merida understood that growing up meant embracing not just new freedoms, but new duties, too.

By those standards, Turning Red is a disappointment. Its own mother-daughter story skips the depth and maturity that’s been such a Pixar hallmark, leaning instead on a short-sighted, do-your-own-thing ethos. Indeed, in some ways, it’s almost the grinning doppelganger of Brave .

Turning Red starts where Brave ends—with Mei expressing an understanding that personal freedom and autonomy inherently need to be balanced with the needs of family and community. “I am my own person,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean doing whatever I want. Like most adults, I have responsibilities.”

But while Brave suggested that mature understanding was something that people grew into through adolescence, Turning Red suggests that’s something we should grow out of .

“I like boys!” Mei eventually shouts at her mother. “I like loud music! I like gyrating! I’m 13! Deal with it!” In the movie’s ethos, this isn’t a childish temper tantrum: It’s a declaration of emancipation, Mei telling her mom that she was done following her rules. (And this at an age when child psychologists say that adolescents are literally, in some ways, a little crazy.) In fact, Mei even uses a spin on a pro-choice slogan that’s chilling for a couple of reasons: “My panda, my choice,” she says.

Now, admittedly, Mei’s rebellious panda stage comes with some lessons for mom and dad. Mei’s mother is pretty controlling. And as adolescents mature, parents can gradually ease up on the restrictions a bit—especially if their kids, like Mei, have proven themselves to be reliable. Teens need to have room to explore their individuality and test some limits; it’s part of growing up. Doubling down on rules and restrictions without context can indeed lead to rebellion and, sometimes, fractured relationships.

But this story lacks the nuance or the fortitude to show where Mei was wrong, too. The movie suggests that, while family values are all well and good, the individual trumps all. It’s the ethos of the “me generation,” just spelled M-E-I.

And that’s not the only way that Turning Red slips from Pixar’s historically sky-high podium. While the story’s entertaining, it’s not engrossing. It’s competently, but not beautifully, made. And while many of Pixar’s best didn’t have a whit of Plugged In content concerns, this has plenty—from its spirituality to frank sexual asides to a few crass words and phrases.

Sure, you can find plenty of worse fare out there for children. Turning Red didn’t have me turning red. But it didn’t leave me tickled pink, either. And given Pixar’s lofty pedigree, that left me feeling rather blue.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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Why turning red's reviews are so positive.

Pixar's latest movie, Turning Red, will be released on Disney+ on March 11 and it's already getting a lot of praise for its animation, story, & more.

Turning Red is Pixar ’s latest movie, and unsurprisingly, it’s already getting positive reviews from critics. Pixar continues to be a powerhouse in the world of animation and keeps on treating the audience to at least one movie per year, each one with a different setting exploring a different culture or world, but all with the studio’s signature moral lesson at the end and with a good dose of humor. In 2022, Pixar will bring two very different movies for the audience to enjoy, and the first one is Turning Red .

Directed by Domee Shi, Turning Red takes viewers to Canada to meet Meilin "Mei" Lee (Rosalie Chiang), a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian student who one day discovers that whenever she gets too excited or stressed, she turns into a giant red panda, but she can turn back if she becomes calm. This “condition” turns out to be linked to her ancestors, who have a shared history with the species as a family curse, but the curse can be contained by performing a special ritual on one specific night… which to Mei’s luck, coincides with a concert of her favorite boy band. All of this, of course, as she deals with everything puberty throws her way.

Related: Where To Find Luca’s Turning Red Pixar Easter Egg

Turning Red was originally planned to be released in theaters, but as the coronavirus pandemic evolved and the Omicron variant appeared, Pixar and Disney changed their plans and Turning Red was sent directly to Disney+ (though it will be released in theaters in countries where Disney+ isn’t available). At the time of writing, Turning Red holds a 94% score on Rotten Tomatoes , with critics praising the story, animation, Shi’s direction, and its approach to a different culture. Here’s what the positive reviews of Turning Red are saying:

Associated Press :

“The best thing about “Turning Red” is how it broadens the horizons of the 36-year-old animation powerhouse with a refreshing vantage point and some new moves. If some of Pixar’s greatest movies have used high concepts to illustrate existential quandaries, “Turning Red” (which like the previous two Pixar releases is streaming only; it debuts Friday on Disney+) is one of the studio’s most specifically drawn films.”

“For decades, Disney sold little girls polished princess fantasies to sell toys. But in that, they also sold an idea of girlhood that was woefully limiting. Here, the fantasy has an element of body horror but is treated with a jocular touch that makes Turning Red an absolute blast. In giving us a protagonist who is confident, kooky, but also a mess, Disney and Pixar gave kids a role model who rejects convention and is better for it — and better for us.”

“Shi has transformed the studio's typical visual sensibility to incorporate the influence of 2D anime, where the facial expressions of characters are pushed to the extreme, and backdrops can change entirely alongside a character's emotions. Pixar's creative team have never been silent about their love for anime (the studio's last film, "Luca", was set in a fictional town named after Hayao Miyazaki's "Porco Rosso"), but the genre's visual sensibility has seldom influenced the look of one of their movies quite like this. [...] It's more of a hyper-kinetic feast for the senses than we've come to expect from Pixar, and more than any of their movies in recent years, immediately invites repeat viewings just to pore over every single detail.”

“The Ludwig Göransson score thrums and flutters like only a Ludwig score can. And the distinct visual style — incorporating anime speed-lines, face-filter emoji reactions, and a defiantly tween-girl pastel-pink sparkly sheen — means it looks unlike anything the studio has done before. Turning Red not only keeps Mei’s experiences and emotions at the heart of the story; the entire film feels like it’s filtered through her personality: ebullient and energetic and irresistible.”

“Turning Red is a film that takes what appears to be a familiar tale of culture clash under the backdrop of a coming-of-age story of self-discovery and breathes new life into it. With literal magic, Turning Red leans into the creative possibilities that come with the story's time period and themes. The red panda element to the story gives Turning Red its core premise but it's the cast's naturally buoyant energy that makes the film stand a cut above the rest.”

Turning Red follows the trademark computer-animated style of Pixar movies, but its anime influences are what are making it stand out from the rest, and they also gave the creative team more freedom to better express Mei’s emotions and struggles through her more exaggerated facial expressions and even the colorful backgrounds. Although these details have been pointed out as some of the biggest strengths of the movie, along with the story itself and how it addresses puberty, its use of culture, and Ludwig Göransson’s score, there are some critics that aren’t fully on board with what Turning Red has to offer, with some finding that it continues some of Pixar’s worst recent trends and doesn’t bring anything new. Here’s what some of the negative reviews and opinions of Turning Red are saying:

In Review Online :

“The animation style is an unthinking hodgepodge of comic book affectation and broadly “Asian” nods, its aesthetic design primarily cribbing from anime, but throwing in some Kaiju iconography for good measure. The skill still impresses, even as its conception is haphazard at best and borderline offensive at worst, but ultimately not much worth lineating given how derivative it all is. [...] Turning Red is not only a disappointment in its own right, though, but is as blunt an expression of post-2009 Pixar’s worst tendencies as we’ve yet seen: uninspired, insipid, and increasingly reliant on winking referentialism to compensate for lacking originality.”

The Guardian :

“It’s also, perhaps, a self-aware demotion for another under-par film, one that’s not without merits and the occasional biggish swing, but a far far cry from the partnership’s wildly inventive heyday. What once felt organic has come to feel far too over-calculated from the wacky but-wait-what-if set-up to the but-wait-it’s-actually-really-about allegory and coming out less than a year after Luca, which had a similar transformation narrative, Turning Red feels like factory line Pixar.”

Pixar has a well-established formula that even though it’s repetitive, most movies manage to give it a fresh twist thanks to their stories and characters, but it’s still going to be a talked-about point about Pixar’s movies . Turning Red is no exception, and it’s not surprising that it has been mostly well-received but it has also been divisive, as it’s a new visual style for the studio and addresses more serious and at times complex themes that some viewers might not want to watch in a Pixar movie, but are ultimately necessary for the studio to be more inclusive and diverse and ensure that viewers have at least one movie or character they can relate to.

Next: Will Lightyear Also Release On Disney+ Since Turning Red Is?

THE MOVIE CULTURE

Turning Red Movie Review & Summary: Subtle and Loud, Pixar’s latest is a Period Film

With Turning Red, Pixar has managed to do just that by capturing the life of a teenage Chinese-Canadian girl as she undergoes a journey of self-discovery in a conflicting environment, largely contributed by her tradition-loving and controlling mother (much like Disney’s Brave ).

Turning Red Movie Cast

• Rosalie Chiang as Meilin
• Sandra Oh as Ming
• Ava Morse as Miriam
• Wai Ching Ho as Grandma

Turning Red Movie Plot

Meilin “Mei” Lee(Rosalie Chiang) is the perfect 13-year-old any parent could wish for. A studious, helping, and abiding young girl that Mei Mei is, she constantly works towards winning her mother’s approval. Still, she has some secrets which her mother will not approve of such as part of being an obsessive group of friends who go gaga over the boy band 4*Town.

Apart from her newfound likeness towards boys, Mei Mei does as her mother wishes which include helping her with the family temple duties. After a bad day, one night Mei Mei goes through a nightmare. When she wakes up in the morning, she has turned into a giant red panda. Trying to hide from her mother, she leads her to believe that she has started menstruating. Soon, Mei Mei realizes that the panda comes out when she’s going through an overflow of emotions.

She heads to the school but is secretly followed by her concerned mother. An embarrassing situation follows releasing the red panda. After a quick chase, back at home, the secret behind the panda is revealed to her by her parents. All the daughters of the family were gifted by the family deity with the power to turn into a red panda when they reached the right age. Mei Mei is told about the ritual she will have to go through that will get rid of the panda.

The ritual’s one month away and meanwhile, the pop boy band 4*Town is touring the city. Unfortunately for poor Mei Mei, the ritual will happen on the same day the concert is taking place, putting her in a spot where she will have to choose between the ritual and the concert. 

Turning Red Movie Review

Life in the teenage years is tough. Too much happening too quickly without enough time to grasp anything. A lot of changes taking place suddenly can play on the nerves of any growing-up teenager. But what happens when along with coping with the usual changes, a teenager has to cope with living in a mixed cultural environment. Sounds pretty serious, but always trust in Pixar to put together a soulful and funny coming-of-age animated film.

From Lion King to Encanto , familial conflict happens to be hot in the animation movie market. Turning Red seems to go towards the same direction from the start and rightfully so, it does explore the waters. Overachieving kid and obsessively controlling mother makes for the stereotypical Asian parent-kid dynamic. Turning Red’s first act plays on these stereotypical tropes quite from the beginning. The traditional mother expects her daughter to stick to the cultural sentiments and stay away from the bad influences. The daughter, while constantly at odds with her own wishes, still follows the dictum to keep her mother happy. 

But first impressions aside, Turning Red redeems itself by achieving much more. The troubling journey through puberty is given a metaphorical image through the giant red panda which comes out every time Mei Mei goes through an emotional swing. The title itself hints at the onset of the menstrual cycle when literally things turn red. The increased curiosity towards boys, frequent emotional outbursts, constant internal conflict, and the urge to rebel bring to life the nuances of the female growing-up experience. Reconciliation happens at different levels between friends, family, and within. Domee Shi, through Turning Red, tells a story of the seemingly traumatic experience of going through puberty, along with the acute portrayal of how familial baggage continues to haunt generations of its members. Mei Mei’s constant attempt to win her mother’s approval is mirrored by her mother Ming Lee’s (Sandra Oh) need for the same from her mother. 

It’s just not the love-hate relation Mei Mei has with her mother that’s touched. Mei Mei is also lucky to have a group of friends, which by the way consists of a Korean, an Indian, and a Canadian girl (representation is taken care of). The girl gang’s obsession with the boy band 4*Town presents plenty of opportunity for real moments of friendship between the four, who despite the cultural differences of their backgrounds, stand as rock for each other with minor hiccups on the way. Irrespective of gender, it becomes relatable for everyone who has turned towards their friends when they found themselves hitting the bottom in the turbulent teenage years.  

Vibrant animation style with loud and expressive characters, accompanied by three original songs written by Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell make Turning Red a constantly eventful, vibrant, and enjoyable watch while at the same instance handling important topics with immense care. U Know What’s Up and Nobody Like U, sung by Eilish and O’Connell, are catchy and memorable original songs from the duo, the latter one being accompanied by some chanting in Mandarin at the back adding cultural flavor to the pop number. The young voice cast does a remarkable job in filling the characters with innocence, ingenuity, and excitement. Sandra Oh doesn’t require a special mention or appraisal as she’s relentless as always even behind the screen. 

The Movie Culture Synopsis

Nobody does it better than Pixar to lay complex subjects on a delicious platter and make it so easily palatable in the form of magical stories. Dreamy sequences with some big, starry-eyed young teenage girls driving the plot, and the relatable conflict at home, merged with the personal female experience, brought out through colorful animation and meaningful symbolism make Turning Red a necessary watch, especially for kids in the same age as the characters.

The layered storytelling achieved by this animated film will definitely make way for some dining table conversations between kids and parents. For girls, especially the really young ones, it provides a picture of things to come in a rather subtle and less horrifying manner.

For young boys, it’s a starter lesson that takes them away from the constant delineation of the female experience. In its essence, apart from the negligible issues with the cultural handling, Turning Red is colorful and magically real. 

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