Title: Turning Red Year: 2022 Genre: Animation, Family, Comedy Country: USA, Canada Language: English, Cantonese Director: Domee Shi Screenwriters: Domee Shi, Julia Cho Music: Ludwig Göransson Cinematography: Jonathan Pytko, Mahyar Abousaeedi Editing: Nicholas C. Smith, Steve Bloom Voice Cast: Rosalie Chiang Sandra Oh Ava Morse Hyein Park Maitreyi Ramakrishnan Orion Lee Ho Wai-Ching Tristan Allerick Chen James Hong Rating: 7.6/10
Canadian-Chinese director Domee Shi’s first feature film, TURNING RED is a Pixar production imagineered with her full-fledged creativity, a very personal story of a 13-year-old Canadian-Chinese girl Mei (Chiang) in Toronto around the beginning of 21st century, on the cusp of adolescence, Mei finds herself sandwiched between her filial duty and full embrace of who she is. Not that there is an option here, in no way would Mei end up conforming to the former, Mei’s own personhood is reifying as a downy red panda thanks to a mythical endowment way way back, that through the family line, every female member of her maternal family is blessed with a transmogrification into a red panda when they’re in high emotion, and in modern ages, each girl must undergo a ritual during a red moon night to seal her inner panda inside a talisman, a metaphor of suppressing her true self to be conformable to the society at large. That tradition discontinuities in Mei, who gets most of rapport from her best friends Miriam (Morse), Priya (Ramakrishnan), and Abby (Park), a nice pool of racial diversity (Caucasian, Indian and Korean), consolidated by their collective pre-pubescent obsession with a red-hot all-boy group called “4-Town”, whose concert in Toronto concurs with Mei’s pre-arranged ritual. So during the crescendo, you will see a giant red panda bulldoze the concert’s stadium and even more red pandas trying to save the day, in the realm of children-book animation, human intervention is conspicuously wanting. All is well that ends well, the chief conflict is between Mei and her strict mother Ming (Oh), whose own panda-repressing past casts a deep scar between her and her mother (Ho). Ming is a difficult character to devise in Shi’s conceptualization, she cannot be a one-note villain, as someone who has experienced exactly what Mei is experiencing, she could’ve been more sympathetic. Her kaiju-sized panda indicates that her emotional compass is far more turbulent than others, she is a victim-turned-victimizer, but Shi and her collaborators give away nothing more about Ming’s past, which leaves the story lean on the objectionable blaming-the-mother angle. Steadfastly telling the story from a young girl’s perspective, TURNING RED also has a double meaning as a metaphor of menarche, a rite-of-passage from girlhood to womanhood. Boosted by a vigorous voice cast led by Chiang and Oh, kaleidoscopic and life-like visual design, engaging storytelling, to say nothing of its irresistibly cute fluffiness, Shi’s debut feature earns its validation fair and square, being the first Pixar feature film solely directed by a woman, it is a glorious and overdue victory. referential entries: Enrico Casarosa’s LUCA (2021, 7.7/10); Ron Clements and John Musker's MOANA (2016, 7.0/10).
Cinema Omnivore 