Pixar’s 2022 feature Turning Red opens in Toronto in 2002, and its heroine has a problem that is not a metaphor for anything tidy. Meilin “Mei” Lee, 13, turns into a giant red panda whenever her feelings get too big.
That is the whole engine of the film, and it is enough. Domee Shi directed Turning Red from a script she wrote with Julia Cho. It runs 100 minutes. It is the first Pixar feature solely directed by a woman, and it is the fastest production in the studio’s history, made for an approximate $175 million over four years.
Trailer, via Pixar.
Mei Lee and the Panda
Mei lives with her parents, Ming and Jin, in Toronto. She helps tend the family temple to her maternal ancestor Sun Yee and works hard to make her mother proud. She also hides things from Ming — chiefly that she and her friends Miriam, Priya and Abby are fans of the boy band 4*Town.
One night Ming catches Mei’s crush on Devon, the 17-year-old convenience store clerk, and humiliates her in public. Mei has a nightmare full of red pandas. She wakes up as one.
The rules are clean. Strong emotion triggers the change. When Mei returns to human form, her hair stays red, so she goes to school in a touque. Ming first mistakes all of this for Mei’s first period. The truth arrives during an altercation with the school’s security guard, when embarrassment flips Mei into the panda and she runs home in tears.
Ming and Jin then explain the curse. Sun Yee was given the transformation to protect her daughters and her village in wartime, and every female descendant has carried it. In modern life it is inconvenient and dangerous, so the spirit must be sealed in a talisman by a ritual on the night of a lunar eclipse — one month away.
Friends, Money and a Concert
Mei’s friends find out, and they like the panda. Better: Mei learns she can control the transformations by concentrating on them. Ming lets Mei resume a normal life but refuses to let her attend 4*Town’s upcoming concert. The girls raise money for tickets at school by exploiting the panda.
The cast is doing real work. Rosalie Chiang voices Mei, Sandra Oh voices Ming, with Ava Morse as Miriam, Hyein Park as Abby, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan as Priya, Orion Lee as Jin Lee, Wai Ching Ho as Grandma, Tristan Allerick Chen as Tyler, James Hong as Mr. Gao, Lori Tan Chinn as Auntie Chen, Mia Tagano as Lily and Sherry Cola as Helen.
Two production details stand out. Pixar hired Chiang in 2017 for scratch vocals when she was 12, chosen partly because she was a local child actor based in nearby Fremont, about 35 miles from Pixar’s Emeryville headquarters. After two years, Shi and Collins found they could not imagine anyone else, and Pete Docter personally approved her for the lead. During an early 2020 session, Shi surprised Chiang with an extra script page and offered her the role in character as Ming. That session, just before the pandemic hit the United States, was their last in person. Pixar shipped professional audio equipment to Chiang, who built a studio in a room of her parents’ house.
Sandra Oh was Shi’s top pick for Ming — a fellow Canadian, and an actor Shi felt could carry the range of complex emotions the part needed.
Toronto as an Asian Tween Fever Dream
The setting is specific and stylized. A production designer confirmed the 2002 Toronto date in February 2021. Shi called the film’s overall look an “Asian tween fever dream.” Executive producer Dan Scanlon described it as “a very soft, colorful, magical, idyllic, almost youthful version of the city.”
Shi drew on how games like Pokémon, EarthBound and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild stylize their worlds in a “chunky, cute kind of way.” The team wanted to capture boy band popularity at the turn of the millennium and how teenage girls reacted to it. Animators visited Northern California for references, studied red pandas at the San Francisco Zoo, and looked at Chinatown architecture in San Francisco and the Bok Kai Temple in Marysville.
Ludwig Göransson composed the score, his first animated film. Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell wrote original songs.
What Turning Red Gets Right
The panda is not a decoration. It is a mechanic with rules, a cost and a deadline, and the film treats it that way. That is why the mother-daughter fight lands. Ming is not a villain; she is a woman who sealed her own panda and expects her daughter to do the same. The eclipse ritual is a clock, and the film uses it.
The anime influence is the other real choice here. Hand-drawn 2D effects were laid over Pixar’s 3D animation to catch that influence, and the result does not look like the studio’s other films. The 2002 Toronto setting is not nostalgia for its own sake. It is the specific texture of a specific girl’s life, and the film is better for refusing to sand it down.
Where it slips is in the middle stretch. The ticket scheme is thin, and 4*Town never becomes more than a plot device. The friends are drawn with affection but get less room than they deserve.
- Directed by Domee Shi
- Written by Domee Shi, Julia Cho and Sarah Streicher
- Voices: Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Ava Morse, Hyein Park, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Orion Lee
- Score: Ludwig Göransson
- Original songs: Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell
Key facts
- Release: 2022
- Runtime: 100 minutes
- Budget: approximately $175 million
- Setting: Toronto, Ontario, 2002
- Metacritic: 83/100
Turning Red is a coming-of-age film that trusts its own weird premise, and that trust is the reason it works. The first Pixar feature solely directed by a woman is also one of the studio’s most personal. It earns its place.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
