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Mei and her friends are determined to attend the 4*Town concert, so filmmakers knew they’d need a spectacular venue for the occasion. Artists started with the actual dimensions of Toronto’s SkyDome, then played with the scale to find the sweet spot, allowing the climactic ending to unfold to its greatest potential.
I've seen Turning Red in a theater and now that I have, I'm really upset that most people aren't going to experience it like this. I don't think I've ever felt more seen by a film like this as an Asian Canadian in the Toronto area. 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.
Disney's Turning Red collection:
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. If like many other fans you collect Disney figures, then the Turning Red collection is a must-have with nine figures all from the film. Mei and her friends are loving, unabashed fans who don’t have to overcome their dorky passions to find self-acceptance and social acceptance. Mei isn’t the “dutiful Asian child” stereotype, nor is her mother the overbearing “tiger mom.” Turning Red gives us a parental figure who doesn’t have an easy route to self-acceptance and doesn’t have all the answers, but who recognizes, in the end, that it’s more important to parent like a team leader than a tyrant.
In fact, it might be a sign of how special Turning Red is that it’s attracting the kind of criticisms that aren’t really controversies at all, but rather baffled, individualized emotional explosions in response to a film that disobeys the expected rules about what it’s supposed to be.
Funko Pop Turning Red Figures Gallery
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.
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?) What is clear, however, is that Mei’s family approach to the panda inheritance clearly isn’t healthy for all of them. The conversation about disobedience largely ignores that the thing Mei disobeys is awful: Having her soul essentially ripped apart in a kind of exorcism that doubles as an emotionally scarring, possibly even physically painful intervention — even conversion therapy. If you’re a kid who’s faced with that kind of family pressure to give up a huge part of yourself, it’s arguably okay to feel a lot of negative emotions about it, and to refuse to go through with it. If obedience is going to give you lifelong trauma, sometimes you simply must disobey.
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Many people are reading Turning Red as a narrative about intergenerational trauma. This can manifest as learned behaviors in response to oppression, abuse, or other challenges that are then passed down through the family or community — like Mei’s family inheritance — until they become embedded and difficult to interrogate. It’s also easy to see this narrative as a commentary on the way Asian diaspora children deal with the tremendous expectations they face to succeed — even in societies where they face discrimination and alienation, often silently.
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