Turning Red

Released Friday on Disney+, Turning Red, Pixar's newest film, takes on a journey with a 13-year-old girl as she navigates her life through early 2000s Toronto while also experiencing some unusual changes.

Turning Red follows 13-year-old Mei Lei as she navigates her life trying to balance her friends and love for boy bands with her overbearing mother and obligation to her family. If that wasn't complicated enough, she also turns into a giant red panda when she gets too excited.

Overall, this was a fun movie. This is probably one of the funnier Pixar films with Mei and her friends supplying most of the humor. Aside from the humor, this movie does a good job with the storytelling. In typical Pixar fashion, it can take complex concepts and issues and make them understandable to a younger audience. In this movie, the concept is growing up and dealing with overbearing parents. This film does a great job of showing the conflict in Mei where she wants to hang out with her friends but is also afraid of disappointing her parents. You feel the tension between these two ideas and see how the conflict slowly starts to break down on Mei. The movie also does a good job of allowing the audience to sympathize with Mei. You can feel her embarrassment when her mom does overprotective things. You can also understand her feelings when she wants to make sure she has fun and has a relationship with her friends but also wants to stay connected to her family and make her mother proud. A lot of criticism I have heard on this film was that the concept is for a very niche audience and if you are not a teenage girl or have never been a teenage girl then you will not be able to connect with this movie. I did not see this issue at all. The audience can still connect with Mei as a lot of people have had to deal with overprotective parents and everyone has had to experience becoming their own person and learning to live their life outside of their parents. Also using these issues and feelings, the movie does a great job of making Mei a likable character as you want her to be happy and can understand the conflict inside of her and can understand why she does what she does.

Unfortunately, I had a few significant issues with the film. One of the first issues was that the film started off a bit too chaotic. The first 15-20 minutes of the film seem so scatterbrained jumping from one event to the next. Thankfully it mellowed out and calmed down a bit once Mei turns into a panda but those first 20 minutes were a bit overwhelming. Within the same realm, the actions the mom does at the beginning of the film seem a bit too extreme. The actions the mom takes that embarrasses Mei seem unrealistic even for a movie where a girl turns into a giant red panda. It is just really hard to believe that her actions in response to finding that Mei likes a boy would be rational in anyone's mind. It was so bizarre and felt so unrealistic that I thought it was a nightmare dream sequence, not an actual event. Finally, the mother-grandmother relationship felt underdeveloped and just there to attempt to add an emotional moment in the end. Towards the beginning of the film, it is implied that there is some tension in the relationship, however, this is not addressed again until the end and does not make for a very strong emotional moment as you do not know all that they have gone through or why their relationship is how it is.

Overall, this is a fun movie that manages to tackle a difficult concept. Unfortunately, it does have some issues that keep it from being a top-tier Pixar film.

Grade: B Score: 7/10 Recommendation: Worth Checking out