Thirteen-year-old Mei Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) is just like any other high-achieving dork from a loving, slightly smothering Chinese-Canadian family. Then her hormones kick in. Like many kids at this pivotal moment, her emotions take on a life of their own. What sets Mei Lee apart is the fact that her emotions also take on a form of their own: at moments of extreme excitement (and since Mei Lee is 13, extreme excitement is the default setting), she turns into a large red panda.
Pixar’s latest, and the first feature from Domee Shi (director of the terrific short film Bao, about a sentient dumpling), Turning Red is a fizzing, squealing adolescent explosion of a movie that nails a fundamental truth about growing up. Puberty may be something that pretty much everyone has to endure, but at the time it feels like a uniquely mortifying and personal experience.
What doesn’t help Mei Lee is that, at the very moment her body takes on a mind of its own, her mother seems to lose hers. Over-protective Ming (Sandra Oh) pursues her daughter to school with armfuls of sanitary pads. And this is the gently radical core of this appealing animation: it’s that vanishingly rare thing – a piece of pop culture that not only addresses menstruation, but does so in a constructive manner.
The message is one of female friendship, embracing change and cuddling your inner panda, of working through mother-daughter friction. Here, there’s a kinship with Pixar’s Brave, but for the most part Shi visually references Japanese anime, in particular the uplifting, female-led storytelling of Ghibli’s Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata.
• Turning Red is only on Disney+
