Review of TURNING RED: Fluffy Furball

March 13, 2022

It was 2002 in Toronto, Canada. The Lee family managed the local Chinese Temple dedicated to their ancestors, and conducted entertaining tours for tourists. Meilin "Mei" Lee (Rosalie Chiang) was a 13-year-old over-achiever in her school. Her strict mother Ming (Sandra Oh) made sure Mei stayed focused on her school work and made sure that she would not get distracted by other "useless" interests, like boys and boy bands. 

One morning, Mei woke up from a nightmare and realized that she had turned into a giant red panda. Ming revealed that this was a family trait from her side of the family, but it had a ritual to contain it for good. At first, Mei was very distressed, but with the help of her close friends Miriam (Ava Morse), Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Abby (Hyein Park) who accepted her, she realized that when she was calm, she reverted to her human form. 

This latest film from Disney-Pixar is directed by Domee Shi, Pixar's first solo female and Asian director. It tackled very familiar themes of coming-of-age, rebelling against authority, self-discovery and self-acceptance. These topics are practically in all of the Disney films since "The Little Mermaid" (1989) and "The Lion King" (1994), to "Brave" (2012) and "Moana" (2016), all the way to their latest ones "Luca" (2021) and "Encanto" (2021), only tumbled around in every possible cultural context and configuration of conflict.  

The overbearing authority in focus here were the "tiger moms" who are obsessively involved in their children's education, instilling fear and and shame in children who failed to deliver perfection. This stereotype had been so notoriously associated among Asian immigrant families in the US and Canada. In this film, Ming was characterized as such a humungous scary monster, it was very disturbing, despite efforts to lighten things up with comedy.

The best part of this film was the artwork and animation of Mei's red panda, who was cute and adorable in all its gigantic fluffy furball glory. This technical aspect definitely held up Pixar's reputation of excellence in the field of animation, despite the rehashing of overdone stories.  I was relieved that the father character Jin (Orion Lee) provided a nice balance. Subtle hints of LGBT relationships were present as part of current trend on inclusivity. 7/10.