A turn for the worse

Pixar’s latest animated film, Turning Red, is the kind of kids’ movie adult critics will love, but many parents will be less than thrilled with it. Maybe that’s why Disney opted to skip Turning Red’s theatrical release, sending it straight to Disney+. Disney knows what sells, and many parents won’t be buying what this movie offers.

Turning Red tells the story of Meilin Lee (Rosalie Chiang), a middle-school girl living in Toronto. Meilin belongs to a Chinese Canadian family that owns a small temple dedicated to ancestor worship, a religious practice based on the belief that the spirits of deceased ancestors will look after the family. After school Meilin helps her mother Ming (Sandra Oh) clean the temple and give tours, but teenage Meilin is torn between honoring her parents and having fun with her friends.

One morning, things get weird for Meilin. After an emotionally charged night involving her overprotective mother, Meilin wakes up to find she’s been transformed into a giant red panda. It turns out Meilin’s parents have been hiding a family curse from her. Being a giant red panda in middle school leads to high jinks as well as embarrassing situations, and Meilin’s relationship with Ming suffers as she leans into her panda reality.

For more than 25 years, Pixar has been the gold standard for animated films in both storytelling and technical execution. Turning Red continues this tradition, in some ways, but ultimately the film abandons what made Pixar special.

The animation and world-building are superb, and director Domee Shi—who is Chinese Canadian—includes many authentic, yet subtle details of Chinese culture. The temple isn’t just a place of worship—it’s also a gathering place for the community and a gift shop for tourists. Chinese dads know how to cook, toilet paper is a multipurpose commodity, and no one likes the number four.

Also, millennials will feel nostalgia for their middle-school years while watching this film set in 2002. There are no smartphones. Instead, kids carry Tamagotchi digital pets. And true to the era, Meilin and her friends are obsessed with a boy band called 4*Town. (Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O’Connell wrote the songs, and they nailed the sound of the music industry at the height of the boy-band craze.)

But for all the things Turning Red gets right, it contains other things that will make many parents cringe. The PG film contains some instances of edgy, though not particularly strong, language, and not every family enjoys jokes about menstruation, though one could argue they make sense in a movie about a teenage girl undergoing bodily changes.

In Turning Red, the panda serves as a double metaphor. The panda symbolizes puberty: Meilin is growing up, and both she and her mother struggle to cope with her movement toward adulthood. The panda and Meilin’s relationship with Ming also symbolize how immigrants must navigate two cultures, both of which claim to be their home culture. These could have been fruitful metaphors, but Domee Shi buries them beneath themes of self-actualization and personal autonomy.

At the end of the movie, we’re expected to applaud Meilin when she tells her mother, “My panda, my body”—an allusion to the popular abortion slogan. It’s the kind of vapid modernist soundbite that Pixar used to challenge rather than endorse.

With Turning Red, Pixar abandons decades of nuanced storytelling and warms over Disney’s clichéd advice to follow your heart. The studio challenged this messaging 10 years ago with Brave. Both Brave and Turning Red feature strong-willed mothers and daughters who don’t meet each other’s expectations. And both movies feature family members who transform into bears. But Brave is a more truthful movie. The heroine tries to follow her heart but brings devastation, and in the end, she says she’s sorry. Meilin lets the panda loose, destroying Toronto, but in the end, everyone decides Meilin was right all along.

The message of Turning Red: You can do whatever you want as long as you stay true to who you are. And the good news—according to Pixar—is you’re free to decide who that’s going to be. The rest of us? It’s our job to affirm you and your decisions.