Turning Red - Movie Review
Turning Red - Movie Review
Critics Score - 8 of 10
General Audience Score - 8 of 10
SUMMARY - Our deep dive into the world of red pandas begins with an introduction to Meilin Lee (voice of Rosalie Chiang) or Mei as we watch photos of her life as she hangs out with her parents. We hear her narrate why it’s important to honor your parents, “but if you take it too far”, she ponders out loud, “well, you might forget to honor yourself.” Next she’s bouncing down the Toronto sidewalks and immediately her upbeat, quirky and outgoing personality is evident while she talks about turning thirteen and being an official grown up according to the city transit authority. Mei is a very amusing character, especially in her relationship with her mother Ming (Sandra Oh), the hilarity is inescapable, at least for the first half of the film. As Mei discovers her panda changing abilities, her over-the-top mother provides some wild and zany humor. Mei first turns into a panda one morning, bolts into the bathroom and her mother mistakes it for Mei’s first period. The film mentions growing up, puberty and blossoming interest in the opposite sex in a way that is exceedingly rare for a cartoon. Although it plays many of these things off in a comical way, the humor tapers off and it dives into many more serious themes in the second and third act.
As Mei starts getting the handle of her emotions, the trigger to her giant red panda shape shifting, the film shifts from lighthearted and adventurous to a more mature coming of age story and being who you are despite other’s expectations for you to be something else. Topics touched on range from not just girls starting to like boys, but also of lying, sneaking out of the house, doing things behind a parent’s back and toxic parenting. Surprisingly, this was the second Disney film in a row after Encanto to depict unhealthy overbearing parenting as a theme and one of the lessons learned being geared towards adults. The relationship dynamics between parents and young adults as they’re growing up, wanting more freedom and earning responsibility is really well portrayed. As Kei wants more freedom, she pleads with her parents to go to a 4*Town (Backstreet Boys equivalent) concert with her friends. While her parents, especially her mother, see this request as more of a threat, they want to protect her from bad influences and keep her on the straight and narrow, even if that means locking her up in a sense.
As a parent, I can see that balance is needed in giving kids freedom, being overprotective can sometimes push a developing child further away but too much freedom can also be disastrous. Turning Red explores some of these ideas, as well as Mei wanting to be her own person, start making her own decisions and being independent. Although I was excited to see many of these topics mentioned in a film genre that generally steers clear of them altogether, it was disappointing that most end up being left unexplored. But the metaphors for things related to puberty, getting body hair, having body odor and girls starting their monthly cycle are brought up and it was wonderful to see them referenced in the light that it’s normal and ok to talk about these topics. The concept of locking away a part of our personality, even the most undesirable part, was honestly what I found to be the most fascinating part of all the film’s themes.
While I enjoyed some of the animated sequences the film had to offer, as well as the design and colors of the pandas, I found much of the actual animation was underwhelming and subpar for Pixar. Facial details were scarce, hands and skin all had the look of smooth plastic with very little detail to immerse our viewing experience. When held up against Soul or even Luca from last year, which both have beautiful and rich color palettes, Turning Red maintains a reddish orange and muted jade blue theme I found to be particularly dull and uninspired. The voiceover work was very good, I enjoyed the efforts to make these characters feel more fleshed out, like when Rosalie Chiang flips out at turning into the panda, her work, while funny and amusing, also makes it easy to buy into her hysterics. The original score from Ludwig Göransson (Tenet) was perfectly decent work that has a nice range of upbeat poppy tunes combined with oriental strings and flutes. Even though I struggled to decide between rating this a very high 7 or a very low 8, I enjoyed this film a bit more than Luca (7) so I settled on an 8 and overall found Turning Red to be a perfectly entertaining outing from the Pixar Animation Studio.
SUMMARY - While not a masterpiece, exceptional or revolutionary film by any means, Turning Red does have a very resonating story that older kids, adults and parents alike can identify with and enjoy. Most would have a tough time not enjoying this film to some degree, because we’ve all been embarrassed by our parents at times and found ourselves Turning Red as the films double (or maybe triple) entendre title suggests.
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