Pixar Pint #25: Turning Red

Spoiler: none of us were upset that the movie doesn't mention 9/11.

Welcome back to Pixar Pints, our two-summer-long journey through all 26 Pixar films in release order.

Man, when we started Pixar Pints, this was the most recent Pixar movie. Now Lightyear has been out for a year and Elemental drops literally tomorrow. What a time to be alive.

Anyway, this was a movie of firsts and lasts for Pixar.

First: feature film directed solely by a woman. This should have been Brave a whole decade earlier, but John Lasseter replaced Brenda Chapman with Mark Andrews halfway through production because he’s a jerk. Turning Red director Domee Shi had been a storyboard artist for Pixar since 2011, and she drew on various elements of her life as a Chinese Canadian woman¹ in telling the story this movie presents.

Last: feature film Disney-Pixar released directly to Disney+ in the wake of the pandemic, so it didn’t do nearly as well at the box office as it absolutely could have had it gotten a theatrical release in North America. Like Luca, it did still get the theatrical run in countries that did not have access to Disney+. One of us will get into this and you can probably guess who.

The movie itself is another coming-of-age film, which you could reasonably describe as Pixar’s bread and butter at this point. Two of the three movies before this one (Onward and Luca) were also coming-of-age stories, as are some of the firm’s classics in some way or another (Finding Nemo most obviously, but also Inside Out, Coco, Brave, and probably also the Incredibles, Cars, Monsters, and Toy Story franchises if you expand the criteria a smidge).²

How does Turning Red compare to any of the above?

Let’s get into it.

Turning Red quick facts

Release date: March 11, 2022 | Director: Domee Shi | Music: Ludwig Göransson, with original songs from Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell

Starring: Rosalie Chiang (Mei), Sandra Oh (Ming), Ava Morse (Miriam), Maitreyi Ramakrishnan (Priya), Hyein Park (Abby)

John Ratzenberger as: No one. I don’t even know who Pixar is anymore.

Budget: $175 million | Box office: $20.1 million

Academy Awards: Nominated for Best Animated Feature but lost to Netflix Animation’s Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Eli

This is the first time I’d seen this movie.

Aesthetic: 10/10 | I wasn’t a teenage girl in the early aughts but I did live through the early aughts and yeah, this hits. The decision to set the story in a real North American city and get the naming and design licenses for real buildings/stadiums was a good one, grounding everything in a sense of realism despite the obvious fantasy elements. As far as character design goes, I enjoyed how the major characters all had their own flair and didn’t just seem like carbon copy humans.

Animation: 10/10 | In 2001, Monsters, Inc. was considered an animation marvel because of Sulley’s fur simulation. In 2022, Turning Red simulated fur for several red pandas at once and it was maybe the 15th most impressive feat in the film.

Story: 6/10 | I have just one gripe with the story but it’s a gamebreaker. At Tyler’s party, Ming confronts Mei’s friends, blaming them entirely for Mei’s missteps over the past month. Asked to stand up for her friends, Mei freezes and retreats toward her mother. This makes no sense to me. At this point, Mei has every reason to stand up to her mom. She’s already given the speech to her friends about how she’s over doing everything her mom says; she understands that her mom does not necessarily act in her best interest. She has long since understood that her friends are her true comfort, the ones who help contain the beast. There is zero reason for her not to side with her friends in this scenario. Every actor is worse off for her failure to do so, and she seems mentally mature, so she probably knows this. After this, the story jumps forward in time eight days, and in the interim, it’s implied that Mei has not contacted her friends and has possibly not been in school at all. This was certainly an extremely stressful week for Mei. How did she keep the beast contained without her friends’ love? How did she keep the secret from her mother? How did everything wait to come out until the ceremony? I don’t think this is a nitpick; it broke the flow of the story for me. Everything was pointing to that confrontation being the climax of the movie but then it just wasn’t. It baffled me to no end.

Characters: 9/10 | Aside from that seemingly uncharacteristic misstep from Mei, I liked how the characters were written (and even the Mei thing can kind be explained by generational trauma, but not entirely or excusably). Ming is a controlling jerk for most of the movie, but the same trauma goes an even further way toward explaining her actions. The fact that her arc is completed by recognizing simultaneously that she’ll never be perfect to her mother and that she shouldn’t expect the same of Mei is a touching moment that allows her to get away with a lot of heinous parenting earlier in the film. I would have hated Mei’s dad as a character if they never gave him a moment and spent the whole runtime having him get shushed by Ming, but that his conversation with Mei is what finally (belatedly) set the climax in motion added the depth that his character deserved. Mei’s friends are all pretty one-note, but they remind me of my friend group in high school, so it’s hard to say they’re “bad”.

Acting: 10/10 | I have never heard of most of the credited voice actors in this movie, but they knock it out of the park.

Music: 9/10 | “Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell make good, fun pop music” isn’t exactly a revelation. Did you know “Nobody Like U” peaked at #49 on the actual Billboard Hot 100? Banger. The combination of this Max Martin-esque boy band cheese with traditional Chinese music added something to both sounds that I never knew was missing.

Final score: 9/10 | If you ignore the rising action going on for two scenes too long, this movie hits just about all the right notes for me. I felt simultaneously nostalgic and as though I’d embarked on a brand new adventure.

Leah

Aesthetic: 10/10 | This movie nailed the aesthetic tone. I’m a child of the aughts and I loved how they incorporated the style of that era into the movie. Pixar pushed what they could do with character facial expressions in a way I loved. The anime/2D cartoon influence added to the charm of the movie. I also liked how they pushed the surrealism of the environment to highlight the emotional experience of being a teen girl, like in the convenience store scene.

Animation: 10/10 | I love how this movie leans into the cartoony style. Lots of fun moments with the red pandas.

Story: 8/10 | I want Pixar to make more stories like this, drawing from specific cultural experiences. 25 movies in and we’ve got the first film solely directed by a woman (of color, at that). Domee Shi draws inspiration from her experiences as a Chinese Canadian woman to tell this specific story. It’s not a perfect story, and it’s gotten valid criticism over various aspects, but what movie hasn’t? I think it tells a great story about growing up that most people can relate to, Chinese Canadian or not. It’s a touching narrative about growing up and making your own choices.

Characters: 10/10 | I love everyone in this movie. The middle school friend group, the extended family, the mom, the dad, and of course Mei. The kids reminded me so much of people I knew growing up, and seeing their friendship was so sweet. The family interactions struck the right balance of hilarious and heart-warming.

Acting: 9/10 | The performances in this movie are funny, heartwarming, gut-wrenching…just running the gamut of human emotion in the best way.

Music: 10/10 | Aughts pop + traditional Chinese music + killer Pixar film score = something really special. They absolutely nail fitting the music into the aesthetic of the movie.

Final score: 10/10 | Really good movie, and an important first for the studio. Touching story, amazing art style, nostalgic in all the right ways, definitely not a Pixar film to miss!

Maddy

Aesthetic: 9/10 | Animation: 10/10 | Story: 8/10 | Characters: 9/10 | Acting: 10/10 | Music: 10/10 (highly influenced by 4*Town)

Okay, so first, pretend I start this review gushing about 4*Town for like four paragraphs. Cool? Cool.

I really, really like Turning Red. The characters are fun (I am Miriam irl), the music and score are some of Pixar’s best work, and it has a wonderful story at heart.

It felt cathartic in a sense. A creative, original Pixar movie that embraced the medium of animation and let its creatives explore new ideas. It wasn’t revolutionary like their early films were to animation as a whole, but it felt like the Pixar of before: open to any idea and doing their best to bring these stories to life.

A film about a Chinese Canadian girl growing up in the early ‘00s and all that encompasses that part of life? Hell yeah! It’s not a perfect story and, admittedly, Pixar has only gotten that perfect twice in my account. But it lets the story be told and flourish, letting generations young and old experience these stories and connect with them.

It’s this part that makes Turning Red being put only on Disney+ really sting. It followed the trend of the last two Pixar films also getting no theatrical release in America. As someone who’s said these three films were a return to form for Pixar, a turn in the right direction for the studio, seeing these movies shipped off to a streaming service just to be forgotten amongst the sea of “content” and their value diminished because they were branded as “Disney+ Originals”…it hurts, and it hurt Pixar staff too.

These films did not deserve this fate. Soul, Luca, and Turning Red will always be my favorite collection of consecutive Pixar films. They were creative, imaginative, and emotional. It reminds me why I love film, and why I love Pixar Animation Studio. I hope the future is bright.

Final score: 56/60 or 9/10

David

Aesthetic: It feels like the early 2000s, in a really good way. It’s well-done homage without being hokey, as we saw in Luca.

Animation: I don’t like how they animated the people in this movie. It’s not the first one—I make a call to it in my Soul review—but it’s a glaring issue here for me. I’m glad they didn’t continue on the path of hyperrealism, but this feels very Illumination (derogatory).

Story: Eli calls this out, and I’m glad he does, because it’s something that totally wrecked my interest in it: there’s a pivotal plot point where Mei, instead of standing up for her friends when they’re given the blame for her actions by Ming, falls into line with Ming instead. It doesn’t make any sense! You spend an hour+ building Mei into a character that can and wants to stand on her own two feet and then completely wipe the chalkboard clean! It neuters her arc in a way that really missed the mark, and it’s not a decision that I think makes sense in the scope of the story either—Mei spends so much time growing into her own person and building that independence, and I don’t think that an overbearing mother figure explains away what looks to me increasingly like a completely baffling decision on all fronts. I think it was a decision made to give the familial arc more emotional impact, but for me it made it feel much more orchestrated and tropey.

Characters: See above—Mei’s good up until she fumbles the metaphorical bag. I don’t really feel like Ming gets the full scope of how poor a parent she is, though I’m also not sure it was ever intended to wrap up that cleanly—but to have a linchpin of your story be that moment of realization, I sort of wish that we’d had a bigger impact post-moment. That one moment of acknowledgement Mei’s father gets is supposed to be this big, pivotal moment, but it sort of falls flat in the way he’s a fly on the wall for 98% of the film. The friend group is sweet, very clearly based in real-life archetypes.

Acting: Largely names I don’t know that did quite well.

Music: It’s catchy. I think they nail the classic late-nineties/early-aughts boy band aesthetic that was everywhere, and did so in a way that drew some really fun parallels to modern group acts.

Final score: 7/10 | This is a great step forward in terms of acknowledging experiences we don’t get to see on the big screen very often, especially from a studio like Disney. I just think a few major pitfalls cripple the movie, bad decisions that hang heavy in a way that makes it glaringly obvious what this film could have been.

P.S. Most of the humor in this movie had me actively cringing. Big miss, and the movie almost fell a couple more points because of it.

Final notes

Another friend of ours had this to say:

“Turning Red is far and away the best movie Pixar has put out since at least Inside Out, and has soared to the highest echelon of my rankings. Puberty is kind to no one, but especially to young girls and AFAB people. I have yet to meet anyone that looks fondly back on that time in their life, but I didn’t know how blown away I would be by a piece of media that was actually a love letter to it. I cried multiple times watching this, not only at the emotional high points but at the mere fact that a high-budget movie by Disney/Pixar was openly discussing periods. The relationship between Mei and her mother is one that resonates deeply whether or not you’re Chinese-Canadian (but especially if you are). I needed this movie at 29 and I’m sure that there are many that need this movie at 12. It’s funny, heartwarming, and healing all at once.”

Numbers next to each film are each reviewer’s overall rating out of 10.

Next up: Lightyear

1. Shi was born in China and her family immigrated to Canada when she was two years old.

2. The Good Dinosaur is also a coming-of-age story, but we don’t talk about that one.