Anthony's Film Review - Turning Red (2022)

The story of an animal curse nicely enhances a story about culture and adolescence...

Disney/Pixar's 2022 animated film Turning Red begins as a story that has been told plenty of times before: a young person of Asian descent dealing with the tug-of-war between traditional Asian culture and modern Western society. Asian traditions demand discipline and honor, often leading to strict parenting and unrealistic expectations of perfection in achievement. Western society likes to promote carefree fun, which a hardcore Asian parent might highly disapprove. There will certainly be emotional tensions stemming from these conflicting worlds. I know Asian Americans who have gone through this.

Surely, Asian Canadians go through the same thing. The main character of Turning Red is Meilin Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang), a 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl in Toronto who is both an overachiever pleasing her mother Ming (Sandra Oh) and a cool laidback person to her friends Miriam (Ava Morse), Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), and Abby (Hyein Park). Like many Asians in Western societies, Meilin isn't living one life fusing two cultures, but rather living two separate lives. She has to behave very differently depending on who she is spending time with. More importantly, she has to keep the two worlds separate, because the matriarch of one considers that world to be incompatible with the other.

Then the story takes a rather unusual turn. One day, Meilin wakes up having turned into a giant red panda, which, she soon learns, is due to an ancient Chinese magic spell. So now we have a third plot element: the need to perform a ritual on a certain date to remove this curse. Interestingly, it connects back to Meilin's life with her friends, because there's another date that concerns her: the day when 4*Town, their favorite all-boy pop band, will come to Toronto on their concert tour. She might not be able to do both the curse removal and the concert. Ugh, decisions, decisions!

I'll tell you what I definitely liked about the second half of this movie. The story of living with the panda curse, in the moments leading up to the ritual day, ultimately enhances the other two culturally separate stories. Meilin discovers, to her mother's delight, that patience and calmness can help maintain her human form and prevent her from turning back into a red panda. Meanwhile, interesting things happen once Meilin's friends discover her alternate animal form. It makes the friendship story even more imaginative. And obviously, I won't spoil anything about the climax. Just wait and see how clever everything comes together.

The daring addition of an animal curse story and showing us how it impacts the typical tale of a Westernized Asian youth make this movie much better than I expected. It's one of those stories that involves an unusual yet brilliantly original combination of plot elements, something we haven't really seen before. After all, we've seen plenty of stories about second-generation Asian youngsters, but never have we seen one that can transform into a giant red panda with interesting consequences. It's the kind of story that you'd expect from Pixar, an animation studio that thrives on creativity, by telling new stories or, as with Turning Red, retelling an old story in a whole new way.

Anthony's Rating:

For more information about Turning Red, visit the Internet Movie Database.