It Came From Streaming: Turning Red (Dir Domee Shi, 1h33m, 2022)

The last 18 months have been rocky for Disney. Yes, their grip on Western popular culture now resembles that of a boa constrictor, but elsewhere, their stranglehold is strangely absent. Their 2021 television content was curiously lacking-a solid, but unadventurous trio of Marvel/Star Wars series, mostly redeemed by the off-kilter Loki and Wandavision and Star Wars partly repaying the debt with the transcendent Visions anime series. On the big screen, most of their tent-pole releases were cut down to size by COVID; that, for example, Nightmare Alley and The French Dispatch were basically dumped onto streaming this side of the Atlantic.

Even, whisper it, the nigh-unstoppable Marvel Cinematic Universe curiously faltered, with the enjoyable Shang-Chi and the over-laden Eternals beaten into 9th and 10th places, behind, believe it or not, Andy Serkis's charmingly campy Venom: Let there Be Carnage, a resurgent Chinese box-office, and the monster mash of Godzilla vs. Kong. Sure, Spider-Man: No Way Home walked away with the lion's share, but here Disney get only a small part of the pie. Even the venerable Walt Disney Animation Studio had a less than impressive year, at least economically with the extremely charming Encanto only really reaching mainstream success once it arrived, with a Billboard #1 in tow (and a seemingly inevitable EGOT for the omnipresent Lin-Manuel Miranda, if it wasn't for those meddling Eilishes), on Disney Plus.

Leave it thus, to Pixar to save the day. Or, rather, leave it to Pixar and Disney + to save the day, or at least make the day profitable to Q1-4 forecasts. For, if you can believe, for the last three Pixar films, from the excellent and thought-provoking Soul on Christmas Day 2020, to the charming and sweet Luca in the summer of 2021, and now to Turning Red in spring of this year, each and every one has been released, without the dreaded premium paywall in the place, as a major incentive to subscribing to the increasingly encylopedic streaming service. All three have, even without a critical release, been fantastically popular entries in the Pixar canon.

Turning Red, though, is more than simply an impressive carrot to dangle in front of prospective audiences. Although this is, undeniably, with Pixar's stellar track record, and family audiences being among the last to return to the multiplex, at least partly a financial decision to funnel viewers straight to streaming, it seems as much to save money by avoiding financial losses from its key demographic waiting till video/streaming release release, and $100 million advertising campaigns, as it does to make it attracting them to Disney Plus. It is so, so much more, as almost every Pixar film is, has, and will always be, than simply the product of calculations and finances. Pixar have always been different. Pixar have always been about the power of stories, and how animation can make even the most familiar stories and plots fresh when seen through new eyes.

Domee Shi first caught the eyes of animation fans everywhere with the Academy Award-winning short, Bao. Attached to the beginning of Incredibles 2, it's not only eight short minutes that wordlessly sums up the Asian-immigrant experience in an emotionally resonant and heart-rending piece of cinema that sums up parenthood, and love as nurturing and destructive force, but is the first ever Pixar film to have a sole female director, and their first short to be directed by a woman, period. (Her Oscar is also the first to be won by a woman of colour.) Turning Red, for its part, is the first feature length Pixar film solely directed by a woman, and whilst their protagonists are very different-Turning Red flipping the generational divide and the mother's smothering love for their child on their head, it's easy to draw comparisons between the two films, from their focus on parental expectations and youthful rebellion, to their perfectly rendered renditions of Chinese-Canadian life, and understand, as with so many of the more recent Pixar films, their personal nature to their director.

We're thus introduced to our heroine, Mei Lee, via a montage of her childhood, only to be interrupted by Mei of the present, who paints herself in a very different, and indeed more rebellious light, and in this one action, sets up the film's central conflict. On the one hand, we see her with her school-friends, the tomboyish Miriam, the deadpan Priya and the energetic Abby, and it is this central quartet who carry much of the energy, of the forward motion of teenage girls, of adolescence, first love, puberty, and the complex negotiation of the world of school, and yes, boys. This is the film's master-stroke, at least in its protagonist-we've had plenty of male Disney (and Pixar) characters coming into adulthood, but arguably the closest Disney have come to a teenage female protagonist learning her place in the world is in Moana and Mirabel from last year's Encanto.

That she is another character representing as much her creator as a previously unseen demographic in Disney's canon (Mei is only the second Asian protagonist in the entire history of Disney, and a first for Pixar) feels as important as her representing teenage girls, regardless of what prudish or bewilderingly sheltered members of the film-reviewing community may think. This is a story we have not seen before. We have, however, seen the complex relationship between her and her strict, and at points overprotective mother, Ming (Sandra Oh) before. It is, in the film's other masterstroke, the central struggle from Bao refracted backwards. They are, if nothing else, a superbly rendered cinematic conversation between the two films-they are, of course, so much more-like the film before it, there is such incredible nuance, such care in depicting the experiences of its generations of parents in children, and at no point in the film's central conflict does it lean back into the lazy stereotype of the tigermother or the pushy Asian parent.

What it does do, as Bao did so excellently, is question if parental love can become stifling-whilst Ming's appearances on school grounds, or the fact that Mei has begun to hide her interests and even her friends behind a veneer of hard-working and diligent student are initially played for laughs, her mother's confrontation, and dressing down of a local convenience store clerk to the personal embarrassment of Mei is where the film's depiction does take on a less amusing note. Here, the film intersects both the controlling sense of her mother's love, especially given the mistaken nature of idle school-book doodles that any budding artist can empathise with, and her mother's dismissive view of her hobbies and friends, intersect. Even before the supernatural element stomps into the room, in all its fluffy glory, the film is a masterful depiction of a teenage girl trying at once to be herself, and what her parents desire.

Add a colossal red panda, though, in what may be the best single non-human design Pixar have ever come up with, and the film, like so many outings from this studio given just that extra little tweak, and the film steps up in magnitude. This is not merely because Panda!Mei is so perfectly animated, a perfect encapsulation of the film's anime-influences, worn proudly on their sleeve, and taking in everything from Ghibli's Totoro to cult 90s series, Ranma 1/2 and Sailor Moon, but because she looks like this through the prism of a studio that are, daringly allowing their visually stunning feasts of films to be cartoonish and expressive in a way that computer-animated films haven't been, at least for anything under the auspices of the Mouse, for what feels like a decade. Pixar are allowing themselves to be, like their heroine, to be imperfect.

Mei, awaking one day to find she had been transformed into a red panda, does the natural thing and panics, her mother trying to console her through the bathroom door she locks herself, in, and soon Mei begins to realise what causes this unusual state, and, following a disastrous day at school, finds that her mother, (and kindly father, Jin (Orion Lee), knew this would happen one day, with her mother revealling that she herself once turned into a similar panda and that this aspect of Mei can be banished forever in just under a month, but that it must be kept a secret. With the colossal fluffy panda now unleashed, Shi, and her fellow screenwriter, Korean-American playwright Julia Cho, reveal their secret weapon-this panda is not only impossibly adorable, but laden with symbolism.

What does Mei's new form symbolise? Certainly, there's the film's thematic adoption of periods and womanhood something that seems to have irked curtain-twitching middle America, that's laced throughout the film as Mei becomes interested in (five member) boy-band 4*Town (and their songs, written by the aforementioned Eilishes), whilst the outbursts of rage and heightened emotions as both panda and human Mei are undoubtedly allegory. But the film is too rich for such a narrow reading-the panda undoubtedly, could be read as wholesale allegory for Chinese identity-something that, despite a shrine to the ancestors being a key location in the film, that most of Mei's older relatives have had to hide away but Mei now brings out into the open.

The panda stands for rebellion, eventually breaking loose of the restrictive structures that Ming places upon Mei, and becoming free and respected. The panda stands for creativity, something her mother is afraid will distract her from being a good student, but is nurtured by those around her. The panda stands for Mei's mental well-being, her friends and familiar surroundings and support grounding her, the film ending by showing her living in harmony with her emotions. Needless to say, Cho and Shi's depiction of this adorably fluffy stand-in for so many thematic elements kickstarts our next central conflict-that between Ming on one hand, and Miriam, Priya and Abby on the other-between family and friends, between the strict controls of adulthood and the boundless escapism of childhood.

Of course, childhood doesn't play entirely fair-with a concert by 4*Town rolling into town, which Mei is forbidden from attending by Ming, so she and her friends, who have, together with an increasing chunk of the school population(!) become fond of Mei's panda-form, begin to raise money-via panda-appearances, merchandise and photographs-towards their tickets; again, it's where he film's animation style comes into its own, its quick energetic style on perfect display in this montage. However, following a party where Mei loses control of the panda, and the shocking revelation that the ritual to seal it away and the 4*Town concert is on the same night, so Ming confronts the quartet, and Mei's resolve fails her, failing to support her friends, and agreeing to be rid of the panda.

What follows is a spectacular finale, that utterly hinges, on grand scale, on Mei navigating that great schism between family and friends-that the film manages to do this, and to come up with a visual feast that includes concert, rampaging kaiju-scaled Red Panda, and a wonderfully depicted and emotionally resonant meeting between Mei and her mother, as well as her relatives, and Mei choosing her own path that manages to honour, and honour is undoubtedly the right word, both worlds that she has a foot in. Like Luca and Onward before it, it is a film which meditates upon the very nature of childhood, of family, and manages, out of material that would be staid and played out in another medium into fresh and vibrant new cinema.

For, alongside its peers, in its tale of a young Canadian-Chinese girl finding that adolescence brings more problems than boys, friends, navigating the complex social web of school life, and pleasing her mother, in a charming tale that balances the magical and the every-day, so Pixar have, undeniably, entered a new golden age in their illustrious reign as the best animation studio in America, if not the world itself.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

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