A Big, Hairy Pixar Delight

G ather ’round, small fry, and let the Walt Disney Company tell you a story about certain bodily changes that occur around age 13. You’ll experience growth spurts. Mood swings. Hair where there was no hair before. And then, one special morning, you will awaken to find you have turned into a ten-foot red panda.

Or so goes Pixar puberty. Turning Red, an inventive and delightful new comedy debuting on Disney Plus, is classic Pixar, making a bouncy comedy out of an adorable fantasy laden with allegorical implications. After 2020’s Onward and Soul, and last summer’s superb Luca, Pixar is on a brilliant run of original stories. It has once again resumed creative supremacy at Mouse Inc. A decade or so ago, Pixar had some creative bumps, but these days it is creatively trouncing its big brother at Disney Animation Studios, which hasn’t released a good movie since Moana six years ago and is riding a four-picture streak of ragged banality (Ralph Breaks the Internet, Frozen 2, Raya and the Last Dragon, and Encanto).

Turning Red is spectacularly unlike those last four contrived and misshapen movies because it is grounded in the real world and derives comic energy from legitimate questions about the kinds of problems contemporary families are dealing with. Are we overscheduling our kids? Are we keeping them too tightly attached to us instead of sending them out to make their own mistakes? Are we breeding rule-worshippers and regulationists? Are we giving middle-school homework and résumé-building more importance than they deserve?

Turning Red’s co-writer and director Domee Shi (who made the wonderful Oscar-winning Pixar short Bao in 2018) is a Chinese Canadian who grew up in Toronto in the early 2000s, and so does her 13-year-old protagonist Mei Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang), an overachiever/nerd who discovers that when she loses control of her emotions, she turns into a gigantic red animal that can barely fit in her bedroom. Consternation ensues, along with what I think must be the first extended menstruation joke in the history of Disney cartoons.

The setup is a refraction of Big, with Mei initially being flustered about how to hide her secret and thinking that everyone will get discombobulated by the sight of an animal where a girl used to be, but instead of trying to milk that idea, the movie keeps moving, coming up with a lively series of unexpected plot turns. Early on, we discover that Mei’s family was prepared for the pandification, knowing that there’s a certain genetic predisposition in the females of the family, and anyway Mei finds herself much in demand as a panda. Her friends get used to her quickly — “You’re so fluffy!” — and so this Incredibly Cute Hulk becomes an in-demand party guest and local celebrity with her own line of merch. (The movie is set in 2002, before YouTube, which makes it antediluvian in social-media terms.)

Even better, Mei learns to control her red-panda transformations, which gives her a major edge on Bruce Banner, and her human self is actually improved when her hair turns a brilliant red. (Redheads: What would the world do without us?) The main conflict is the product of a quest to see a boy-band concert before Mei’s tiger mom (Sandra Oh) can tame Mei’s inner animal via a maturation ceremony that amounts to casting out the beast. What if Mei actually likes her alter ego, though?

That the red panda represents both onrushing adulthood and the sort of childish impulse that must be tamed in a solemn rite blurs the parallel, but Turning Red makes a neo-Romantic plea for cultivating the wild side and all things emotional and unpredictable. Ordinarily Hollywood Romanticism tends to be vapid. This time it has a little more bite, centered as it is on the immigrant drive of Mei’s success-craving family. A town that forbids dancing à la Footloose would seem silly today (indeed, it seemed pretty silly in 1984), but an Asian-North American culture that discourages any kind of fun that does nothing for your SAT scores has some salience. If anyone needs to let her inner beast roar, it’s the Meis of our time.