Before he expertly defined pandemic-era ennui with Inside, Bo Burnham made his directorial debut with the 2018 comedy Eighth Grade. Elsie Fisher stars as Kayla, a 13-year-old girl who is desperate to be liked and repeatedly crushed when no one notices her. The beauty and charm of Eighth Grade is in Kayla’s relentless optimism. She spends her time producing a YouTube advice show, even though she has no idea what she’s doing in her own life. In the end, she still doesn’t feel like she fits in, but she just doesn’t care so much about fitting in anymore. She closes the film with a message to her future self to keep going no matter how hard things get.
Kayla, the middle schooler with her anxieties fully on display, who is both fascinated and scarred by social media, is one of the most completely drawn characters in recent film history. There’s more than a little bit of her DNA in Mei Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang), the eighth-grader heroine of Turning Red. She has Kayla’s false facade of self-assuredness covering a core of anxiety. But instead of being a Midwesterner with a struggling single dad, Mei is a second-generation Asian from Toronto with a domineering mother named Ming (Sandra Oh) and an easygoing dad named Jin (Orion Lee). Mei funnels all of her anxious energy into being the perfect daughter for a mother whose aspirations for her include secretary-general of the United Nations. So, no pressure.
Unlike the unpopular Kayla, Mei has friends. Miriam (Ava Morse), Abby (Hyein Park), and Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) think Mei is brainwashed by her mother. Together, the girl gang are obsessive fans of the boy band 4*Town. (“Why are they called 4*Town if there are five of them?” asks Mei’s mom, to no good answer.) Closer to home, they’re currently crushing on a hunky 17-year-old behind the counter at the local convenience store. Mei thinks the boy obsessions are silly, until she finds herself absently drawing pictures of the bodega clerk as a sexy merman. To her horror, Mei’s mother outs her innocent crush to the pimpled teenage boy, who is understandably disdainful of her nascent merman fetish. When Mei erupts in rage for what may be the first time in her fiercely controlled life, she finds herself transformed. Not in the spiritual or mental sense, but physically transformed into a huge, fluffy red panda.
Her attempts to keep her panda-osity a secret quickly fail, and her mother informs her that it’s something of a family curse. Their ancestor Sun Yee was granted the ability to transform into a cuddly but very large red panda to defend her home from invaders, and all of the women since then have had the same ability. But since Bruce Banner can tell you it’s inconvenient to turn into a giant monster every time you get upset, the family has developed a magic ritual to imprison the panda spirit in a talisman. “There’s a darkness to the panda,” Ming says, and it’s better to bottle it up than allow it to roam free.
But is that really the right thing to do, wonders Mei? Her doubts only grow when her grandmother Wu (Wai Ching Ho) arrives to supervise the ritual with her girl gang of Asian aunties in tow. Should she embrace the panda within or submit to soul-crushing but safe normality?
Director Domee Shi is the first woman to helm a Pixar feature. Like her short film “Bao,” which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 2018, Turning Red is a family story told from the perspective of a child in an Asian immigrant family. Although she’s only 34, Shi has storyboarded eight Pixar features, including the seminal Inside Out. As you would expect from a product of the Pixar machine, Turning Red is fleetly paced and visually inventive. Mei’s turbulent tween emotions bend reality around her before subsiding just as quickly as they came, and there’s a great reference to the mirror scene in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, only with cute animals instead of demons. The lycanthrope as stand-in for puberty trope works just as well here as it did when it happened to Michael J. Fox in Teen Wolf. It sets up some truly bizarre moments, such as when inter-generational panda trauma manifests itself as a furry-pocalyptic kaiju attack on the SkyDome.
As a Pixar fanatic, Turning Red is a welcome return to form after the unfocused Onward, but only time and rewatches will tell if it belongs in the storied animation studio’s upper echelon.
Turning Red is streaming on Disney+.
