Turning Red
The Asian-American Brave
Tell me if you’ve heard this one before. An angsty teen with a streak of rebelliousness decides to defy his or her “stuck in the old way” parents and does something different. Along the way, he or she causes some trouble, may or may not turn herself (or someone else) into an animal, and then reconciles with parents with newfound respect, and said parents moderate their own views and increase tolerance and show their love differently.
Now, an unoriginal premise is not an inherent issue, as I wrote about before. There are only so many plot settings and character arcs and archetypes writers can come up with. What the filmmakers do with it, is the next real question. What we have with Turning Red is a bean mouth animated style film that deals with the setting and struggles of Chinese-American youth in 21st century America. Parents have high expectations of child to get straight As and care not for their quirky friends.
The backdrop for all this is our protagonist, Mei Lee, wants to go to a boy-band concert with her DEI friends, frowned upon by her strict mother, and finds herself in comedic antics as she turns into a giant Red Panda when she gets emotional due to a family curse. Failure to communicate on both sides by her and her mother lead to difficulty in removing the curse and a push by Mei Lee to embrace her wild side (literally and metaphorically). All hell breaks loose as Mei Lee, and eventually her mother, lose control of themselves and their red panda forms.
Though the plot is not exactly original, the setting tells a cute story about growing up, parent-child relationships, value of friends, and comedic fantasy spectacle. Its not bad by any means. I laughed at the jokes, cringed at the cringe, and scoffed at the unfortunate continued use of bean mouth animation (it’s here to stay, but I don’t have to be happy about it). The movie is a low effort watch with a low payoff. Nothing more, nothing less.