Turning Red review: A refreshingly un-queasy puberty movie that can’t be divorced from the Disney machine

Dir: Domee Shi. Starring: Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Orion Lee, Wai Ching Ho, Hyein Park, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Ava Morse. Cert PG, 100 minutes

Turning Red is a charming coming-of-age story with lovely pops of imagination and a refreshing lack of queasiness when it comes to its themes of puberty and adolescent sexuality. But it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and it’s difficult to separate it from the context in which it’s being released.

Much of the film’s early press has boasted of its progressive victories: director Domee Shi is the first woman to direct a Pixar movie single-handed, it’s the first Pixar film to revolve around an Asian female character, and the first to be shepherded to the screen by an all-woman team. Rather than toeing the company line, though, shouldn’t we be asking bigger questions? Particularly during a week when Pixar’s corporate overlords at Disney have repeatedly defended their funding of US politicians backing the “Don’t Say Gay Bill”. The bill seeks to stop schools from teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity, with Disney CEO Bob Chapek arguing in a statement that the company’s “diverse stories” such as Black Panther, Soul and Modern Family are “more powerful than any tweet or lobbying effort”.

Disney/Pixar are understandably proud of what Turning Red represents, but questions remain. Why has it taken 25 movies for Pixar to get to this point? Isn’t it depressing that Shi came to be the first solely credited female Pixar director only because Brenda Chapman was unceremoniously dumped from her 2012 film Brave midway through its production? And isn’t it strange that Turning Red has been shunted to Disney+ rather than getting a cinema release?

It’s unfortunate, too, because Turning Red is often striking. It revolves around Mei (voiced by Rosalie Chiang), an enthusiastic 13-year-old living in Toronto in 2002, who’s suddenly beset by hormonal urges and physical changes she can’t control. “Did the red peony bloom?” asks her concerned mother (Sandra Oh). In one sense, yes. Whenever Mei gets too excited, or fantasises a bit too vividly about dreamy boy band 4*Town, she transforms into an enormous red panda.

As metaphors go, it’s an appropriate one. Puberty is a beast, a painful blend of the unbearable and the embarrassing. Chi dramatises it with rich empathy, acknowledging the goofy whimsy of early crushes and timid rebellion, but never mocking it. It’s a level of care that stretches to the animation, which pulls from east and west – there are the stretchy faces and moonlit rooftop dashes of anime, and the furry detail of typical Pixar. The colours frequently dazzle, too, from Mei’s panda limbs appearing in flumes of pink smoke, to boy band members so pretty they seem to sparkle.

The actual mechanics of the plot, though, are less interesting. Mei and her friends monetise her panda self in order to raise funds for concert tickets, and the film’s finale is a kaiju-style brawl involving giant red pandas smashing into one another. The film also loses sight of its central metaphor, puberty parallels giving way to an elaborate family mythology dating back centuries. It sometimes feels as if Shi came up with an ingenious allegory but then worked backwards, leaving the last third of her movie feeling unfocused and far grander than it needed to be.

In its earliest stages, Turning Red is bracingly different, and filled with an earnest warmth when it comes to themes of girlhood and the panic-inducing weirdness of the human body. That it becomes a loud and action-driven spectacle seems disappointingly inevitable for a Disney film. But it also serves as a helpful reminder to not get too swept up in the progressive optics of corporate products. Yes, Turning Red is a positive endeavour in numerous ways, but these things still warrant a certain degree of scepticism.