A problematic panda

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday March 18th 2022. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next, a review of Pixar’s latest animated feature film, Turning Red, currently streaming on Disney+.

But reviewer Collin Garbarino warns that while adult critics might love the movie, many parents will be less than thrilled.

Meilin: I’m Meilin Lee. And ever since I turned 13, I’ve been doing my own thing. Making my own moves, 24/7, 365. I wear what I want. I say what I want. And I will not hesitate to do a spontaneous cartwheel if I feel so moved.

COLLIN GARBARINO: Turning Red tells the story of Meilin Lee—a middle-school girl living in Toronto. Meilin belongs to a Chinese-Canadian family that owns a small temple dedicated to ancestor worship. After school Meilin helps her mother Ming clean the temple and give tours. But now that Meilin’s become a teenager, she’s torn between honoring her mother’s wishes and having fun with her friends.

Meilin: [narrating] I do make my own moves, it’s just that some of my moves are also hers.

Ming: Mei-Mei, there you are!

Meilin: Hey, Mom—

Ming: You’re ten minutes late. What happened? Are you hurt? Are you hungry?

Meilin: Um…

Ming: How was school today?

But then things get weird for Meilin. One night, Meilin has an emotionally charged confrontation her overprotective mother. The next morning, Meilin wakes up to find she’s been transformed into a giant red panda. As you can imagine, being a giant red panda in middle school leads to high jinks as well as embarrassing situations.

Meilin: Wake up, wake up, wake up!

Ming: Mei-Mei, is everything okay?

Meilin: Don’t come in here!

Ming: Mei-Mei, what’s going on, honey? Are you sick? Is it a fever? A stomach ache? Chills? Constipation?

Meilin: No!

It turns out Meilin’s parents have been hiding a family curse from her, and as Meilin and her parents grapple with her new red-panda reality, Meilin’s relationship with her mother breaks down.

For more than twenty-five years, Pixar has been the gold standard for animated films both in terms of storytelling and technical execution. And Turning Red gets a lot of things right.

The animation and worldbuilding are superb, as always. Director Domee Shi 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.

Grandma: Four is the worst number.

Aunt Lily: You know, Vivian was due on the fourth, but I held her in until the fifth.

Grandma: Quiet, Lily.

And millennials will feel nostalgia for their own middle-school years while watching this film set in 2002. There are no smartphones. Instead, kids are carrying around Tamagotchi digital pets. And true to the era, Mei and her friends are obsessed with the boy band, 4-Town.

Meilin: May I remind you what real men look like?

All: 4-Town!

Meilin: Yes! 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 some parents cringe. Some Christian parents won't appreciate the depictions of ancestor worship. Also, the PG film contains some edgy, though not particularly strong, language. And not every family wants to laugh at jokes about menstruation and pads, even though one could argue those jokes make sense in a movie about a teenage girl undergoing bodily changes.

In Turning Red, the panda serves as a double metaphor. On the one hand, the panda symbolizes puberty. Meilin is growing up, and both she and her mother struggle to cope with her movement toward adulthood. On the other hand, the panda and Meilin’s relationship with Ming symbolize the difficulty that immigrant children face trying to 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 sloganeering that Pixar used to challenge rather than endorse.

Meilin: Be careful. Honoring your parents sounds great, but if you take it too far, well, you might forget to honor yourself.

Turning Red merely warms over Disney’s clichéd advice to just follow your heart. But as the book of Jeremiah says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”

Meilin: I like boys. I like loud music. I like gyrating! I’m thirteen! Deal with it!

Turning Red is reminiscent of Pixar’s Brave which came out ten years ago. Both movies 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. 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.

Turning Red teaches kids that you can do whatever you want as long as you stay true to who you are. And the good news—according to Pixar—is that 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.

MUSIC: I wanted it. I went for it. And baby, I did it on my oh oh oh oh own…

I’m Collin Garbarino.

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