Turning Red: Disney’s Toronto-Set Coming-of-Age Story Sweet and Upbeat

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B+

Anyone who lives in Toronto will delight at the unabashed local references, some of them period-specific and all of them spot-on, in director Domee Shi’s giddy animated debut feature, Turning Red.

What’s more, viewers will spend days calculating the number of double entendres the film’s title and subject matter conjure as it revels both in its Canadian and Chinese cultural heritage while forthrightly tackling a subject once unimaginable in film, especially one aimed at tweens and teens even if they’re the ones who could most benefit from it.

Read out interview with Turning Red writer/director Domee Shi

Let’s get some of those Canuck references out of the way at the top. Our protagonist, 13-year-old Meilin Lee (voice of Rosalie Chiang) attends Lester B. Pearson Middle School, where she is in grade eight, not eighth grade as her stateside compatriots would be.

Mei rides streetcars bearing the TTC logo, crushes on a clerk working at Daisy Mart seemingly located on the fringe of Kensington Market, sleeps in a T-shirt bearing a maple leaf, attends classes where answers to questions include the words “Saskatchewan” and “Alberta,” and aspires to see her favourite boy band, 4*Town, at SkyDome (the film is set in 2002).

The story of Turning Red is a titch harder to unpack, especially in its final-ish scenes where the film’s magical elements tear completely free from an earthbound narrative to become something… else. It’s not quite jumping the shark, but things go bananas, and the result is less satisfying than what the filmmakers presumably intended. But the ride to that junction is pretty charming.

The preceding bones are this: overachieving only child Mei adores her doting parents, especially her mother Ming (voice of Sandra Oh), who has clearly essayed author Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

Though obedient and scholastic, Mei is also a teenager and subject to all the physical and emotional upheaval that entails, which puts her at odds with her mom, leading to a series of excruciating embarrassments in front of an audience of peers.

Ming and her husband run a neighbourhood temple. And they worship their female ancestors who had an abiding and, it turns out, continued connection to red pandas. One day, Mei wakes up to discover she has morphed into a giant red panda, a gateway to the first of the many double entendres noted above and an obvious metaphor for the tumult of adolescence.

As it happens, Mei’s emotions trigger the transformation: when she gets upset or angry, she explodes into a panda. From Ming, she learns that the females in the family have a long and fraught history of transmogrification, and the second half of the film charts Ming and Mei’s strategy to harness it ahead of an altering but time-specific ritual. Meanwhile, Mei explores the panda/person’s ancillary possibilities.

Mei soon discovers that the once-dreaded panda has an upside which becomes especially important as she and her three BFFs scheme to raise the money to see 4*Town at SkyDome, which their parents collectively refuse to fund.

There are heaps of note-perfect, delightful scenes in Turning Red: one where Mei attempts to show her parents she can control her emotions as they confront her with an escalating series of mortifying and/or impossibly cute items is a standout.

The camaraderie between Mei and her friends, especially in the face of bullies and other torments, is lovely to behold, as are the themes of embracing rather than downplaying differences, the importance of family (and food!), the invariable conflict between mothers and daughters, and so on.

Turning Red has plenty more to cheer. It’s the first Pixar film solely directed by a woman, and the first set in Canada. Shi, who won an Oscar for Best Animated Short for 2018’s Bao — the first Pixar short directed by a woman — gives us characters that feel authentic, while Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell give 4*Town three terrifically catchy original songs.

And the list of credits is something to behold. It’s mind-blowing to consider just how many hundreds of people worked to make Turning Red the film it became. Not even its rather silly ending can undermine its heart.

Turning Red. Directed by Domee Shi. Written by Domee Shi and Julia Cho. Featuring Sandra Oh and Rosalie Chiang. Available on Disney+ beginning March 11.