And it really felt like, maybe in all these years of asking to be seen on-screen, maybe things went too far.
Li: And she’s obsessed with pop culture, or an element of it. I was really excited to see what her first feature film would look like, and when I saw the animation for the lead character, I got really worried because she looked exactly like me. As a director, Shi has really quirky ideas and draws from a lot of different animation styles. Li: It is about a steamed bun that becomes an anthropomorphized child to this mom who’s suffering from empty-nest syndrome.
Kornhaber: It’s about an edible dumpling child, right? She’s also the first woman to direct a Pixar short: her Oscar-winning film Bao, which played in theaters before Incredibles 2. This film is her debut, and it makes her the first woman to direct a Pixar feature. I went in incredibly stoked for Domee Shi. I walked away from this film really impressed by how well it juggled all of it. And there’s also the element of dealing with parents. Another is the specificity of a Chinese Canadian 13-year-old and what her life is like. One is the coming-of-age puberty element. The first time I watched it, I was surprised by how wonderfully it pulled off all these different elements. It is absolutely a film about magical puberty, but it’s about many other things, too. As director Domee Shi put it: “The panda is a metaphor for magical puberty.” Shirley, what did you think of Turning Red? Then one day she wakes up and she finds out that she turns into a giant adorable red panda whenever she loses control of her emotions. It’s about a Chinese Canadian 13-year-old girl living in Toronto in 2002.Īll Meilin Lee wants to do is hang out with her friends, go to a boy-band concert, and, most importantly, make her somewhat overprotective mother proud. It’s really a remarkably specific animated film.
And also, I think we all kind of love it and want to just fawn over it. It’s doing well in the streaming numbers. It’s been out for a while, debuting on Disney+ about a month ago, but we wanted to talk about it because, well, there’s been some discourse around the movie. Spencer Kornhaber: This week, we’re talking about Turning Red, the latest Disney/Pixar release. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts Spencer Kornhaber, Shirley Li, and Lenika Cruz discuss Turning Red and the state of the animated villain on an episode of The Atlantic’s culture podcast, The Review. While films such as Raya and the Last Dragon create fantasy-pastiches of cultural context, Turning Red follows a real 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl living in Toronto in 2002-who just happens to turn into a giant red panda sometimes. Turning Red is the latest and certainly among the most culturally specific animated works. And with Moana and later films, children’s animation shed predictable tropes of hero/villain plotlines while also centering cultures that don’t have much representation in the depths of the Disney vault. Early iterations in the trend, such as Frozen, had classically good-and-evil setups, but subverted them as the films went on.
PARALLELS 13 STUDENT MOVIE
But while the 1989 Disney movie ends with behemoth Ursula skewered on a ship, the 2022 Pixar film finds its dramatic peak in a quieter moment of mother-daughter understanding.Īnimation didn’t do away with villains all at once. Turning Red, like The Little Mermaid before it, arrives at its climax with the antagonist blown up to kaiju proportions. The conflict in both films involves a broken relationship with a loved one, made cinematically epic by way of magical metaphor. Recent movies such as Turning Red and Encanto certainly have drama, though instead of defeating a cackling evildoer, the main character now typically has an internal battle made external. (Quick: What is the princess’s name in Sleeping Beauty?)īut despite their prominence in classic films, animated villains have slowly disappeared from screens over the past decade. Sleeping Beauty’s haughty sorceress, Maleficent The Little Mermaid’s operatically campy sea witch, Ursula The Lion King’s melodramatically evil Scar-each one so charismatic they tend to obscure their movie’s protagonist. Few characters are as strikingly memorable as a classic Disney villain.
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