Turning Red

Normally, I don’t write about Pixar for this column. It says “Disney” in the title, and we have almost always stuck to Disney. There have been a few exceptions, when the time felt right. But mostly, if it’s in this column, it is directly associated with the Disney corporation, not one of the properties or subsidiaries. However, as I write this, my son is in his first day of junior high. The combination of that and the Year of the Month meant that this was the perfect time to write about this under-seen movie.

Meilin Lee (Rosalie Chiang) is thirteen years old. She lives in Toronto, Ontario, at her family’s temple. The temple is dedicated to her ancestress, Sun Yee, who generations back prayed to the spirits and took in the spirit of the Red Panda to protect her people. She was, it turns out, granted the power of transformation. Which has been passed down to the women in her family. Including, it turns out, Mei. Her mother, Ming (Sandra Oh), promises her it can be sealed away at the Red Moon. She just needs to keep the panda in check until then.

I mean, yes, it’s a menstruation metaphor. Of course it is! Explicitly. Because the other plot of the movie is that, well, Mei is growing up. She’s thirteen. She has three best friends—Miriam Mendelsohn (Ava Morse), Priya Mangal (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), and Abby Park (Hyien Park). Her nemesis is Tyler Nguyen Baker (Tristan Allerick Chen). And her obsession is 4*Town, the exact kind of boy band that was hugely popular in 2002, when the movie is set. Mei’s mother wants her to be the kind of perfect pure devoted daughter that she can be proud of, and Mei wants to be, you know, a person. Her own person. She loves her mom, but she’s not her mom’s doll.

For one thing, there’s her mother’s niggling dislike of Miriam. It’s constant. She doesn’t like Miriam. She doesn’t trust her. She doesn’t think Miriam is a worthy friend. There’s something weird about that Miriam girl. Now, Mei is friends with all three girls, but it’s clear as you watch them that Miriam is her best friend. The one to whom she is closest. And it’s possible Ming knows that, too, and that’s why Ming is hounding about it, but it’s also possible that Miriam is, essentially, white. The ethnic history of Judaism is a long and complicated one, but by the standards of Mei’s group, Miriam is the white one.

Look, my most recent immigrant ancestors are my great-grandmother and her family, and she married into a different ethnic group instead of living in an enclave. We get it. And my ancestors are European, too, so it’s very different. But I think quite a lot of us can sympathize with the feeling that you’re disappointing your parents and that you’ll never be good enough. And also everything is changing and your body is doing weird things and your emotions are all over the place and THAT GUY IN YOUR GYM CLASS JUST WON’T LEAVE YOU ALONE! I sympathize with this so much.

I also love all the anime references. The plot makes me think about Ranma ½, and it turns out going with your gut on that one is a good idea; director Domee Shi was in part inspired by it. And, yes, that image was directly lifted from The Girl Leapt Through Time, because of course it was. I’ve long been a counter to the idea that The Lion King is a ripoff of Kimba the White Lion, because if it is, Kimba the White Lion is a ripoff of Hamlet. But I’ve also pointed out that artists are inspired by one another and drop references to things they love, and that’s clearly what’s happening here.

Kuwait and China have both banned this film because of its explicit references to puberty—Ming offers Mei every variety of pad made, and Mei’s friends assume that’s what’s going on, too. A lot of people are upset that the girls are shown as drooling over boys, because “they’re children.” Yeah. They are. But they’re teenage children, and thirteen-year-olds have crushes. I could tell you stories. I could tell you about my crushes, my friends’ crushes—my older sister’s crushes, which she really wishes I wouldn’t. Thirteen is eighth grade; the drama of eighth grade is wild, and if you don’t think it is, you don’t remember eighth grade.

Zane’s going to be okay. He’s going to learn his way around the school and hopefully make friends and learn all kinds of great things. He’s got an elective about myths and legends that he’s absolutely going to love, I’m sure. In the next few years, he’s going to be growing and changing and developing, and that is right and healthy. He may well have crushes—Priya, for example, has a crush on one of the 4*Town boys but also dances with the goth girl. I promise you that I will not be the mom spying on her kid through the classroom window and chased off by security. Even though I do tend to be the mom who’s known by all the staff.