“Turning Red” asserts the value of a metaphor signifying more than one thing. With any story centered on a 13-year-old’s multidirectional hormones in the sweaty grip of puberty, anything less than one would be a cruel lie.
This is the latest feature from Pixar, quicksilver in its pacing and clear-eyed in its conflicts between parents and children. It’s set in 2002 Toronto, with a Chinese Canadian protagonist blessed with toothy grin reminiscent of Wallace of “Wallace & Gromit” fame.
“Turning Red” is also the first Pixar feature on which a female filmmaker — co-writer and director Domee Shi — ran the show and receives sole directorial credit. Well, these things take a while. Thirty-six years, in this case.
The travails of puberty or puberty-adjacent growing pains have made a few oblique appearances in the Pixar realm before, but “Turning Red” marks the first animated film within the Disney corporate kingdom to feature a sight gag centered on tampons. This is moments after the mother in the story asks her daughter, breathlessly, on the other side of a bedroom door: “Did the red peony bloom?” At this point, young Meili’s hormonal surge has turned her into a giant red panda. So, yes. Something’s blooming, all right.
With that, Shi’s sprightly, inventive film, co-written by Julia Cho, takes its first metaphoric leap. When Mei Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) feels her emotions taking over, not to mention her swoony thoughts about certain members of certain boy bands, the panda comes out to play. She feels like a “monster,” and does not know why this change overtakes her. How can she learn manage these feelings, this messy, unruly stage of development? And with her exacting, controlling mother’s behavioral expectations, can Mei ever be allowed to let it go, whatever the “it” is at the moment?
In deft strokes “Turning Red” introduces the highly verbal, high-achieving, authority-pleasing Mei and her three best friends, voiced by Ava Morse, Hyein Park and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan. They’re a wonderful group of varying personalities. When Mei lets them in on the panda problem, the film takes off. The girls yearn to catch an upcoming concert featuring their favorite crushworthy boy band, 4-Town (inexplicably, there are five of them). Doing so requires significant deception, along with dubious fundraising methods, with Meili busting out her inner panda at a frenemy’s birthday party for cash. Those concert tickets are not cheap!
The larger plot development here relates to the ancient Chinese family curse causing the present-tense problems for Mei. Sandra Oh voices the role of Mei’s mother, who knows more than she initially tells. She manages the ancestral temple, open to visitors; Orion Lee, co-star of the exquisite “First Cow,” does a lot with very little dialogue as Mei’s taciturn father.
The movie accommodates all sorts of visual and narrative ideas, from a climactic kaiju-style battle of monsters to the zingy repartee of a good coming-of-age comedy. It doesn’t all work; the destructo-climax feels rote. But the movie glides along without the knotty world-building and expository detours of “Soul,” for example, or the ruthless pathos of “Inside Out.” I liked both, for different reasons, but the genial frankness and genuine freshness of “Turning Red” is more my speed. At a time when puberty’s hitting millions of kids thwarted in so many ways by the last two years, it feels welcome indeed.
Director Shi made the Oscar-winning Pixar short “Bao,” which deployed its own wild, rewarding metaphor — a steamed dumpling becomes a forlorn mother’s second child — in a story of parental ties that bind, until they’re loosened with love. “Turning Red” is pure Pixar in its imaginative clash of genres and impulses. Yet it’s something new, too, its own cultural- and gender-specific creation. I’m eager to see what Shi does next, metaphorically and every other way.
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'TURNING RED'
3.5 stars (out of 4)
MPAA rating: PG (for thematic material, suggestive content and language)
Running time: 1:40
Where to watch: Premieres Friday on Disney+
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