Why Everyone Should See “Turning Red”

I recently came across a Facebook post from Diary of a Mom about Pixar’s new animated film Turning Red. I was intrigued to note that the reviews ran the gamut, from David Sims’ rave in The Atlantic—he called it “the best thing Pixar’s produced in recent memory”—to the dismissive-at-best review from the managing director of Cinema Blend, Sean O’Connell, who said,

Some Pixar films are made for a universal audience. Turning Red is not. The target audience for this one feels very specific, and very narrow. If you are in it, this might work well for you. I am not in it. This was exhausting.

Hmmmmm . . .

The film is about a Chinese-Canadian middle-schooler living in Toronto. An only child, Meilin Lee—known as Mei or Mei Mei—is an excellent student, extremely helpful to her mother, and totally devoted to her Chinese ancestors, especially the family matriarch Sun Yee, who is described as a scholar, poet, and defender of animals, especially the red panda. When life got really hard Sun Yee’s fierce determination protected her village and saved her family from ruin.

I think we could use a little Sun Yee energy these days, don’t you?

Mei’s world turns upside down as she approaches puberty. Not only does she have to deal with the same “curse” adolescent girls all over the world have to deal with, menstruation and the accompanying hormone fluctuations, she has a unique family curse that arises as well.

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Holy varied reactions, Batman!

Diary of a Mom took the dismissive O’Connell to task for not looking beyond his own white male world to see that young Asian girls need to see themselves and their issues onscreen as much as he needs to see his issues. Hers is an eloquent essay on the fact that representation matters. Though I had not yet seen the film when I read her post, I fully agreed with her and shared her post, saying so.

My own post attracted even more intriguing comments from people who had seen the film already. One woman thought there were much better animated films centering on Asian characters, including Abominable about a young girl from Shanghai who encounters a Yeti on her roof and decides to return him to his home with the help of two friends. I haven’t seen Abominable, so I really don’t know how it stacks up, but it sounds like pretty standard “Hero’s Journey” fare to me. For all I know it may be very well done Hero’s Journey fare, but that’s hardly breaking new ground.

One friend asked why conservatives were in such an uproar about Turning Red. Another, who does not consider herself conservative, decried the “disobedience and rebellion” of Turning Red’s main character, Mei, complaining that she was shallow, rude, boy crazy, and selfish. Yet another commenter, however, was so put off by how the mother treated the daughter that she couldn’t continue watching it.

Then there was the film aficionado whose assessment, “not great, not awful,” clashed strongly with the two women who said they thought it was great, with a message that everyone could relate to.

Wow.

Anything with that wide a range of response was bound to be interesting, so I resolved to see Turning Red as soon as I could.

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Mother/daughter issues

My daughter, Kalea returned recently from New Zealand, where she attended Victoria University). On her twenty-third birthday, the first birthday we’ve been able to share since she turned 18, I asked her if she wanted to watch something with me and her 15-year-old brother. She suggested Turning Red, as she had received a free month of Disney+ as part of a promotional package.

I’m so glad she did.

Immediately, I related to Mei, the ultimate Goody-Two-Shoes, with stellar grades, trying hard to be everything her mother asked of her. One of her teachers describes her as a “very enterprising, mildly annoying young lady.”

I could relate because I was the white version of Mei. I graduated second in my high school class, with a year’s worth of college credit, and went on to an elite college with a scholarship that meant I got through my three years there with no debt whatsoever. I, too, tried hard for many years to win my mother’s approval. In my case, I never quite managed it until I had my daughter, Kalea, in my late thirties.

My mother bonded instantly with Kalea, offering her the kind of unconditional love I had always craved. I sometimes resented how easy it was for Mom to love my daughter, who, unlike me, never felt the need to earn that love. In fact Kalea seemed to be everything I wasn’t as a young child. While I was shy, she was bold. I was repressed; she was expressive. I was obedient and eager to please; she was anything but.

Not long into the film, Mei is struck by a stab of unfamiliar, but age-appropriate, teenage lust and begins drawing beautiful and fanciful pictures of the inspiring lust (beautifully, I might add). Mei intends to keep her drawings secret, but her mother, Ming, finds the notebook and has the ultimate freak-out, bringing new meaning to the term Tiger Mom. Ming’s behavior at this point is so egregious, it is immediately clear to me why my Facebook commenter could not continue watching.

“Who is he kidding? This isn’t ‘niche!’” I exclaimed, pulling my daughter close. “This is mother/daughter shit! Half the world should be able to relate to that.” If O’Connell truly can’t, I sincerely hope he doesn’t have children.

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Ancestral shit

Ming’s freak-out—or is it Mei’s first period? We’re never quite sure—appears to trigger a bizarre response in Mei; she turns into a giant red panda in moments of strong emotion. Naturally, Mei is frightened and ashamed of her new form and tries to hide it from her parents.

Eventually, however, her mother finds out and, rather than condemning her daughter as Mei expects, she exclaims “It’s too soon!”

It turns out Mom has been hiding a—literally— gigantic family secret. Their ancestor Sun Yee was granted the ultimate gift of turning into a giant red panda to protect her children, and all her female descendants have received the same gift at puberty. But in our modern society, those ancient fight-or-flight defenses that stood our ancestors in such good stead are far less welcome. “What was a blessing became an inconvenience,” says Ming. The family has “solved” this problem by devising a ritual to lock the beast away in a piece of talismanic jewelry shortly after it appears. Mei’s grandmother and aunts immediately converge on Toronto to help with the ritual. And we find out—surprise, surprise!—that Ming and her mother have been mildly estranged ever since Ming’s adolescence after fighting over a boy.

History repeating itself.

“This isn’t just mother/daughter shit,” I said. “This is ancestral shit! Everybody should relate to this!”

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Reclaiming authenticity

And indeed it was “ancestral shit.”

Mei discovers to her surprise that her friends don’t find her panda form frightening. In fact, they find her kind of cute! Their unconditional love and acceptance become Mei’s touchstone as she navigates tricky new terrain. “It’s our love,” says one friend. “We’re like a warm and fuzzy blanket.” And she’s right. The warm, fuzzy blanket enables Mei to come to terms with her internal “beast” and integrate it into her daily life so well that when it is time to perform the ritual she genuinely appreciates the panda qualities so many generations of her female ancestors fought hard to banish.

As a result of this new self-awareness, Mei can never go back to being that repressed little girl who tried so hard to live up to her mother’s impossible expectations. The family tradition of repression is so entrenched that Mei has to fight hard to hold onto her new, authentic “self” in the face of those who believe that self is unacceptable. The fight is made all the more difficult because Mei truly loves her mother and doesn’t want to hurt her.

The media will tell you that Turning Red is about periods and puberty, and to an extent it is. Puberty is when most people find a bit of rebellion necessary to carve out an identity that is distinct from their parents. But it’s about so much more than just growing up. It’s about reclaiming authenticity in an environment that is hostile to it.

How many of us have made a similar journey, breaking family and/or societal traditions, conventions, and expectations in order to become the people we came here to be?

And how many of us have dared to do so and found that not only have we been healed by it, but we’ve brought healing to our extended family as well?

And how many of us, especially those of us who consider ourselves “empaths,” have found, as Mei does, the process messy, excruciatingly difficult, and disruptive?

I know I have. No part of it was easy, but I wouldn’t go back and change it for anything.

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The world needs rebels

The world I grew up in was messed up in myriad ways. Yeah, today’s world is messed up in many ways as well, but a lot of the old messed up ways are disappearing because people are daring to examine their experiences and say I refuse to cooperate with this repressive bullshit anymore.

Corporal punishment, hitting children with all manner of implements—in our house it was a belt or kitchen spoon—was an approved part of parenting when I was a kid. Circumcision, cutting away an infant boy’s most sensitive part of his anatomy when he was just days old, often without any form of anesthesia, was almost universal in the U.S. The medical world had convinced women that birthing women needed to be drugged and put in a hospital, and formula was more “scientific” than breastmilk for feeding babies.

While sex was a taboo topic of conversation, the sexual abuse of children was rampant. Teachers, coaches, pastors, doctors, and trusted family members and friends had virtually unfettered access to children of all age. No one spoke out loud about their own experiences, and that allowed the cycle of abuse to continue.

Young girls and women were expected to accept the constant threat of sexual assault as a fact of life. Gender expectations were binary and so rigid that many people lived lives of quiet desperation trying to fill roles they never asked for and never wanted.

Racism was such an entrenched part of the fabric of the culture that no one questioned the heinous crimes of Christopher Columbus. The “Trail of Tears” was barely a footnote in history class. No one mentioned the fact that Thomas Jefferson—the man who wrote “all men are created equal”—kept slaves his whole life or that he fathered four enslaved children with Sally Hemings, the enslaved half-sister of his wife, Martha, who had no legal right to say no to his advances and was herself the child of a slave and her owner. The forebears of people who insist today that Black Lives Matter betrays Martin Luther King’s “dream” celebrated Dr. King’s assassination in 1968 and happily voted for George Wallace and his promise to keep segregation alive.

These are all “traditions” that can, and must, be broken if we are ever to have a society that lives up to its ideals of equality and freedom for all. I expect that the breaking will be a messy and disruptive process that may even appear shallow, rude, and selfish to those who don’t want these traditions questioned, much less broken.

And that’s okay with me.

~ Love, Zoey

P.S. I also recommend watching another “niche” Disney animated film called Encanto, about an elite magical family in Colombia. Encanto explores a similar theme but differs from Turning Red in that it is the “black sheep,” Mirabel, rather than the “golden child,” who must break the powerful spell cast by the mistakes of the past. That is more typical because it is usually the black sheep who can more easily break the bonds of tradition. Perhaps that’s why Encanto doesn’t seem to have generated the same controversy Turning Red has. In any case, real change will required both the “golden children” and the “black sheep” to work together.