Turning Red

The new Pixar movie, streaming on Disney+ as of today.

In much the same way that Buffy used vampires as a metaphor for teenaged angst, Turning Red uses a 13-year-old girl periodically metamorphing into a giant red panda as a metaphor for puberty. Body parts awkwardly growing, developing body odors, hair growing in unexpected places ... This movie is really quite explicit about a lot of issues of early adolescence. It's set in 2002 for apparently no other reason than to make it credible that the heroine would have a major crush on a boy band of the kind that were popular then. (Also, no cell phones, the presence of which would undercut some of the plot crises.)

It's stunningly detailed in many respects, including ethnic issues: the heroine is from a Chinese family, keeping many Chinese cultural traditions - including, apparently, turning into red pandas - living in Toronto. She has three inseparable friends, distinguished from each other by each being of a completely different ethnicity.

Yet it doesn't really follow through on the puberty metaphor, as the heroine exploits her panda nature by virtue of all the other kids finding it not weird or awkward but cute and fuzzy. And then there's the climactic conflict sequence, which while it doesn't devolve into a thrill-park ride (as e.g. Monsters Inc.), does set high marks in the over-the-top, ridiculous, overextended, unnecessary, and undercutting the movie's previously-established norms categories.

The heroine is a nerd, a top student, generally well-behaved when not a panda, which is a real plus; but much of the plot is about her struggles to get out from under the control of her tiger mom of a mother, who knows exactly what to do that she thinks is caring but utterly embarrasses her daughter. A later sequence reveals that mom as a girl had similar struggles with her mother, which raises the questions of how did mom grow up to be so insensitive and controlling, and how did grandma (as she now is) change into a more caring and understanding figure?

Similar Gumby-type animation style to Disney's Encanto, and the magic in both movies makes equally little sense, but while Turning Red (I keep misremembering the title as Seeing Red or Turning Panda) is pretty good, I rank it far below Encanto in subtlety and differentiation of characters, quality of music (the boy band is not really very good, which I suppose is authentic), and above all pacing. There's a slower paced section of Turning Red in the later middle, but I found the first half so incessantly fast-paced that I had to turn it off for a while halfway through to catch my breath.