- Disney slash Pixar
Originality isn't everything, but it's at least ... something. The old cliché goes that there are only four/five/howevermany plots in the history of storytelling, and it has more than a tinge of truth to it. Beyond reducing every narrative to "man vs. nature" or "man vs. himself" or what have you, it's a way to acknowledge that execution means a lot; find a creative way of telling a familiar story, and you might still be on solid ground. But how familiar can a story be and still get away with it? And how much creativity is required to make up for it when the familiarity is just really familiar?
Animated features in particular tend to go to certain wells—like the "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer plot" focusing on an outcast who ultimately learns that being different makes them special—with regularity. My colleague Steven Greydanus several years ago dubbed one such familiar plot construction as "junior knows best," encompassing everything from The Little Mermaid to Mulan to Coco to the recent Encanto in tales of young people straining against expectations imposed by their elders. Disney/Pixar's new Turning Red gives us another variation on that theme, and while co-writer/director Domee Shi (the Oscar-winning Pixar short Bao) brings some cultural specificity and lively animation to the table, it's hard not to feel like that table is still cluttered with stuff you've already seen, in a dozen previous tales of frustrated kids trying to bring parents and/or grandparents around to a new way of thinking.
The frustrated kid here is Meilin Lee (Rosalie Chiang), a Chinese-Canadian 13-year-old living in Toronto with her parents (Sandra Oh and Orion Lee). A super-achiever in school who still manages to find time for her three best friends—Miriam (Ava Morse), Priya (Maitreyi Rama Krishnan) and Abby (Hyein Park)—Meilin seems to be managing what she perceives as her mother's expectations of perfection. However, one night after her mother embarrasses her in front of several classmates, Meilin has a strange dream, and wakes to find that she's been afflicted with the Lee family condition where the girls transform into giant red pandas when they get particularly emotional.
To the credit of Shi and co-writer Julia Cho, they lay one metaphorical interpretation for Meilin's body-changing experience right out on the table, in what might be mainstream American animation's first ever direct reference to menstruation. Turning Red isn't shy about making its character arc largely connected to "becoming a woman"—a refrain used by Meilin and her friends regarding their planned trip to see a concert by a boy band that has them all hot and bothered.
That doesn't mean it's lecture-y, or lacking in pure entertainment value. The creative team creates some delightful character animation, particularly for Meilin, including a sequence where she's practically crawling out of her own skin trying to resist the reality that she's gone a little boy-crazy. A vivid visual sense of time and place emerges not just from the Toronto geographical setting, but from the filmmaker setting the story during her own adolescence in 2002, full of flip-phones and Tamagotchi toys, on top of the 'NSYNC-style original songs written for the film by Billie Eilish and her brother/producer Finneas.
It's clearly a personal story for the filmmaker, and certainly there are unique components to growing up the only child of Chinese-descent parents. But the character dynamics in Turning Red simply feel stale, too similar to the mother/daughter clash in Pixar's Brave, or the restrictive gender roles of Mulan, or the physical manifestation of pubescent emotional tumult in Inside Out. Even the arrival of Meilin's grandmother (Ho-Wai Ching) as the originator of this generational conflict echoes what we saw just last year in Encanto.
There's no question that some viewers will see this story with the same personal connection that Domee Shi does, and Turning Red likely will have a greater resonance for them. Even if you went toe-to-toe with your own domineering parent, however, you might have worked through those feelings in one of the other animated stories about them. This cute, fluffy story about a cute, fluffy alter-ego wants to serve up an emotional finale, except it's one you might have already seen more than a few times over the past 30-plus years.
