If the names O-Town and 2ge+her mean anything to you, then “Turning Red,” Pixar’s new, brilliantly feminist animated film, is decidedly for you.
Of course, it’s for all the kids out there, too. But really, Oscar-winning director Domee Shi’s ode to coming of age is pitch-perfect Millennial bait, crafted especially for those who obsessed over even the lesser boy bands of the early 2000s and burned their own hand-decorated mix CDs to show for it.
设置在Toronto circa 2002, the story focuses on adorkable Mei Lee, a 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl who is unapologetically passionate about overachieving. She kicks butt in school, she goes above and beyond in her daughterly duties at home, and she’s proud of it.
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But a wild streak is growing within Mei (voiced by Fremont resident Rosalie Chiang). She’s not sure how to tell her overbearing mother, Ming (Sandra Oh), about her budding feelings of boy-craziness, her intense attachment to her trio of BFFs (whom her mom disapproves of) and her all-consuming worship of the hottest boy band around,4*Town(whom her mom really disapproves of).
It all comes to a head one night in very public fashion with a mortifying misunderstanding between Mei and Ming about a boy. The moment crackles with a heightened emotional charge that sparks an overnight transformation for Mei, akin to the way mutant powers emerge at adolescence within the X-Men. The next day, Mei wakes up not as her usual tween self, but in the body of an enormous red panda.
Turns out all of this runs in the family, Ming explains, passed down through their matrilineage. “Our ancestors had a mystical connection with red pandas,” Ming tells her daughter. Any time Mei gets overly excited, she’ll “panda” out, and only returning to a state of calm will cause her furry features to recede for the moment. But to rid herself of this “curse” and contain the red panda for good, Mei — like her mother, all her aunties and her granny before her — must undergo a shamanistic ritual during the next red moon.
The red panda, then, becomes an allegory for what girls inherit from their mothers and how we can harness the power to control our own destinies. The panda also works as a stand-in for intergenerational trauma, although it could easily be interpreted as any trait worth hiding that’s been passed down from one’s mother.
A desire to protect Mei from her own inner red panda has guided Ming to exert heavy-handed control over her daughter’s life up until this point. But as Mei begins to come into her own, she finds that she actually likes the panda within. She doesn’t want to fight it — she wants to learn to live with it. It’s a moving realization to witness, and combined with the film’s puberty-triggered cringe comedy and celebration of Asian heritage, “Turning Red” achieves an effect comparable to the magnificent Hulu series “PEN15,” only PG-rated.
在影片中有一些小小的失误,就像一个“my body, my choice” joke that falls flat, and a hyper-capitalist “panda hustle” story line in which Mei chooses to monetize her most special quality without any sort of reflection or reckoning. But as a whole, “Turning Red” succeeds in hitting all the right emotional notes — and its real magic lies in its unabashed celebration of the joyful chaos of girlhood within a proud Asian immigrant family.
M“Turning Red”:Animated. Starring the voices of Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, James Hong and Wai Ching Ho. Directed by Domee Shi. (PG. 100 minutes.) Available to stream on Disney+ and showing only at Grand Lake Theatre, 3200 Grand Ave., Oakland, starting Friday, March 11.