Turning Red

Turning Red, the new film from Pixar Animation Studios distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, really deserved to be discovered as we did in a movie theater as this new animation masterpiece deserves to be seen on the big screen. Unfortunately the current pandemic has changed the cards forever and gives an even more important place to streaming platforms such as Disney+ and many films are thus proposed directly on them without going through the cinema. 

After winning the Oscar for best animated short film in 2018 with Bao, the director and screenwriter Domee Shi realizes here her first animated film and succeeds in her passage from short to long and imposes herself as a gifted director capable of both moving us and making us laugh with a disconcerting ease. The undeniable strength of Pixar Animation Studios is to be able to continue to meet the expectations of the audience with each film. Discovering a new Pixar film means discovering new endearing characters and different universes, but in which themes frequently come up, such as the passage to adulthood, generational conflict and its place in our society. It is also the first Pixar film directed solely by a woman, which takes place in Canada (and not in the United States) and especially the second after Up (2009) in which the main character is of Asian origin. One suspects that director Domee Shi drew on her personal memories to create the character of Mei Lee.

The great strength of Turning Red is that it deals with adolescence and the responsibilities that come with it with real care. We discover Mei Lee a young Chinese-Canadian girl of thirteen, self-confident and awkward, torn between the desire to remain the devoted daughter of her mother and the numerous temptations to discover the world without restraint (concerts of her favorite boy band, outings with friends). However, Mei Lee will realize that she is not a teenager like the others. Indeed, her mother passed on to her her genes and in particular the fact of transforming herself into a giant red panda as strong as very clever. Mei Lee is faced with the choice of listening to her parents or enjoying it with her three best friends and earning enough money to go to a concert with their favorite boy band 4*Town.

Certainly Julia Cho and Domee Shi's screenplay is meant to strike the perfect balance between a realistic world and the presence of a multi-generational family curse that turns the women in Mei Lee's family into giant red pandas and that only magic can control the spell preventing the transformation.  By placing a seemingly normal but dysfunctional family at the center of the story, Turning Red is easily a story about learning important values and the importance of intergenerational communication and knowledge sharing. It emerges a fantastic comedy that sounds perfectly in tune with our current society and whose overflowing imagination reveals an original approach and a gifted director whose inspiration comes as much from Japanese animation (the nod to Kaijū works wonderfully), French and American. So we simply come out happy with this excellent animated film with the desire to see it again immediately. Can't wait for March 11 to see it again on Disney + .

Turning Red
Directed by Domee Shi
Screenplay by Julia Cho, Domee Shi
Produced by Lindsey Collins
Starring Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Ava Morse, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Hyein Park, Orion Lee, Wai Ching Ho, James Hong
Cinematography: Mahyar Abousaeedi, Jonathan Pytko
Edited by Nicholas C. Smith, Steve Bloom
Music by Ludwig Göransson
Production companies : Walt Disney Pictures, Pixar Animation Studios
Distributed by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
Release date : March 11, 2022
Running time : 100 minutes

Seen on February 22, 2022 at Cinema Silencio des Près

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