Turning Red: A Visually Inventive Look at Adolescence

Pixar has never shied away from handling mature topics from depression that may come with major life changes (Inside Out) to mortality and the afterlife (Soul). Turning Red continues this trend by exploring the onset of adolescence, how a young teenager can navigate life with potentially overbearing parents/family and exploring the burgeoning identity that someone discovers as they become their own person.

Turning Red follows the story of Mei, a 13-year-old girl from Toronto who is split between the life she wants to live and the life that her overbearing mother named Ming is trying to guide her towards. Ming is one of the best examples of a helicopter parent in pop culture where she follows Mei around, demands perfection from Mei, and only ever assigns blame to others who interact with Mei when things go wrong in Mei’s life. Because of this relationship, Mei is put in a situation where her mother routinely embarrasses her and is then forced to lie to her mother about what she is doing in her life. It is interesting that the movie would portray this, considering that may make the story unpalatable to parents who may see it as blaming the parents for the bad decisions their children make. It is similar to Tangled in this regard where it portrays parent behaviors that are unhealthy towards the child’s development in a way that is easy for a child to possibly identify in their own life.

It also continues a noticeable thematic trend across Disney properties. Lately, across multiple studios and projects, there has been a notable shift towards projects that deal with how a person handles trauma. Encanto dealt with familial conflict that stems from preferential treatment of certain members of the family over others and then coming to terms with said treatment, the short that ran before it (“Far From The Tree”) follows a raccoon who had a relationship with a parental figure that did not go well and then vows to not repeat those actions against their child. At Marvel Studios, WandaVision has an entire episode devoted to flashbacks to the worst parts of Wanda’s life to explain why she is taking an entire town hostage to live out her fantasies, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has scenes where characters just express the issues in their life that they feel are holding them back (if someone hasn’t seen the scene of Isaiah Bradley telling his story to Sam in episode five of this show, they absolutely should), and Hawkeye deals with Clint’s survivor’s guilt. Even Lucasfilm gets in on the theme when The Book of Boba Fett spends multiple episodes exploring what happened to the titular character in his months in the desert as he heals his body in a Bacta Tank.

Turning Red continues this trend because, while the movie does play the angle of the red panda as an allegory for puberty, that is not the primary conflict of the story. In the past, a film like this would have had the conflict be Mei coming to terms with the changes her body is going through, but that is discarded pretty quickly leading to an interesting exploration of her relationship with her mother. Even as the narrative explores that relationship, it allows for a more nuanced dialogue where it explains why Ming is the way that she is, allow for Mei to understand this in a meaningful way, and then process the changes to the relationship in a way where the two can move forward. Had this film come out even 10 years ago, had they even touched on Mei and Ming’s relationship as the cause of the emotional issues that Mei has over the course of the movie, it would have been completely glossed over.

If this feature was just a conventional animated film without anything special visually, this would already be in the conversation for top five Pixar movies, however it does some really inventive work with blending 2D and 3D animation at times that creates a visually interesting adventure with unexpected emotional depth. It is similar to Soul in this regard where it allows for an interesting blend of visual styles that makes the viewing experience richer. Turning Red is available to stream on Disney+ and also in select theaters (the closest is the AMC in Times Square) so Disney can give it an Oscar run for next year’s Academy Awards. Regardless of how one sees it, this movie is absolutely a must watch.

Final Rating: 10/10