Domee Shi’s coming-of-age comedy Turning Red is winning over critics with its heartwarming message, beautiful animation and humorous take on being a girl going through a supernaturally awkward phase. The new Pixar feature, which premieres as a Disney+ exclusive on March 11, boasts a 94% positive review score on Rotten Tomatoes and 85 on MetaCritic.
Turning Red centers on a confident, dorky 13-year-old named Mei (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) who is torn between staying a dutiful daughter to her mother (Sandra Oh) and the chaos of adolescence in the film’s world of aughts-era Toronto. As if changes to her interests, body and relationships weren’t enough, it turns out Mei has inherited a hairy family legacy: When she gets too excited, she turns into a giant red panda.
Read all about the making of Turning Red in Animation Magazine‘s feature story from the April ’22 issue here.
Here’s what some of the critics are saying:
“Much like the recent Encanto, this is a movie with no real villain except for family expectations: Ming is focused on order and discipline and following what she thinks are the rules, but the screenplay by Shi and Julia Cho understand how much Meimei and Ming are the products of their relationships with their respective mothers … For all of its unforgettable films, Pixar has justifiably taken heat for its lack of women in the director’s chair, and Turning Red acts as an object example of the universal but relatable storytelling that comes from offering a female perspective in family-friendly comedy.”
— Alonso Duralde, The Wrap
“Until I saw Turning Red, I had no idea how much I needed the cute overload of a giant red panda scampering over the rooftops of downtown Toronto … First, it’s a delight to see Toronto playing itself and not standing in for some U.S. location with fewer tax breaks. Second, pinning a mix of tradition and fantasy to the city’s bustling Chinatown community gives the film cultural specificity, while Shi’s light touch provides universal appeal in themes of friendship, the push-pull of complex mother-daughter relationships and the early-adolescent struggle to seize independence and figure out what kind of person you want to be… Turning Red is original, funny and tender, an affectionate reminder that adolescence is a time of life not easily tamed, and sometimes the animal inside us demands release.”
— David Rooney, The Hollywood Reporter
“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 … There are a few tiny missteps in the film, like a ‘my body, my choice’ joke that falls flat, and a hyper-capitalist ‘panda hustle’ storyline 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.”
— Hannah Bae, The San Francisco Chronicle
“…Like [Luca, Brave and Inside Out], we’re dealing with the pains of youth and how growing up affects the family dynamic as reflected via an outlandish conceit. Playwright Julia Cho and co-writer-director Domee Shi have at least tried to add some specificity to the dog-eared formula as well as bravely, for the territory, confronting the less historically Disney-friendly elements of the experience. When Mei Lee first turns into the red panda, her mother assumes that the behind-the-bathroom-door panic is down to her first period and while it really shouldn’t have to be seen as a big deal, for Disney (a studio still playing coy over the existence of LGBTQ people in their live action, let alone animated, films), it’s a medium-sized step and it’s handled without any expected bashfulness. Mei Lee and her friends are also proud fans of the N*Sync-aping boyband 4*Town and one of her triggers is the feelings they arouse within her, another step toward realizing the teenage experience has more nuance than the studio has ever been willing to admit.”
— Benjamin Lee, The Guardian
