In the heart of every straight-laced young girl, there lurks a raging red panda, waiting to let loose. That's the idea behind 2022's Turning Red (the idea's not about turning Communist, thank goodness). The latest film from Pixar to be dumped straight to Disney+ is once again better written than the films Disney has recently released theatrically. It's an adorable and surprisingly raunchy teen comedy, almost like a John Hughes movie, an impression heightened by the main character's resemblance to Molly Ringwald.
But actually Mei (Rosalie Chiang) is of Chinese ancestry, the film being set in Toronto--for no apparent reason in 2002. Except maybe it's to be close to the time of writer/director Domee Shi's childhood as I suspect the film is very personal. I don't agree with the current politics that say every story's subject matter should be matched for the gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation of its writer/director but Shi has real passion for writing about a teen's struggle with emotional repression. This movie is the true successor to Frozen, though it doesn't have any musical numbers as strong as "Let It Go", despite all the songs being co-written by Billie Eilish (despite the fact that Eilish isn't Asian).
Surprisingly, all the songs Eilish co-wrote with her brother, Finneas O'Connell, are for a fictional, typically sugary, boy band called 4*Town. Thirteen year old Mei and her circle of friends are obsessed with this group, something that strongly reminded me of the junior high school girls I teach here in Japan. Believe me, it takes very little prompting to induce them to expostulate at length on the virtues of Snowman, Johnny's West, or Strawberry Prince. That's another reason I don't see why this movie needed to be set in 2002. Maybe Shi just didn't want to figure out how to incorporate texting into the plot.
Toronto sure is a lot more colourful than it is in David Cronenberg movies.
Mei's relationship with her mother, Ming Lee (Sandra Oh), is at the heart of the film's drama. At the onset of puberty, the women of their family start turning into giant red pandas whenever they feel strong emotions. The metaphor for real teen anxiety is obvious and, of course, has been mined many times for stories, though usually stories about boys. But I was reminded of Kare Kano or maybe even Carrie. And, of course, Frozen.
The tight psychological grip Ming Lee has on her daughter is of a kind pretty famous in East Asian cultures. And, oh boy, can I certainly see it here in Japan. Some of the wilder, more transgressive students tell me about it directly, but even they're a bit reluctant. I remember one girl confiding to me that her mother is "an ogre". She must have looked up the translation for "oni" before talking to me. It's a relationship that extends beyond the family and girls will look to other older women for approval before they do anything. I remember talking to a young woman in a restaurant who looked to an older woman present for tacit authorisation before she responded to one of my questions. The older woman smiled and nodded and suddenly the young woman became quite talkative.
It's pretty bold for a Disney film to so directly criticise such a deeply entrenched cultural practice. There's no even-handedness about it, no moment where Mei realises maybe it's a good thing her mother's so much in her business sometimes. No, Ming Lee is the embarrassing helicopter mother who hides behind a tree to watch Mei in class and then tells her, in front of everyone, that her daughter forgot to bring her tampons to school.
Mei finds she can control her panda by remembering her love for her circle of friends, which is sweet, though I wonder if the implications of transferred codependency occurred to Shi. One teen problem at a time, I guess.
Turning Red is available on Disney+.
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