TURNING RED **1/2
Domee Shi2022
IDEA: The life of a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl is thrown into chaos when she begins transforming into a giant red panda during moments of anxiety or excitement.
BLURB: Turning Red is both a sensitive, culturally specific modern fable of a girl’s coming-of-age and a frenzied reiteration of formula. Perhaps it’s too much to expect the current Disney-subsumed Pixar to match its past peaks of creative invention, but there’s no reason Turning Red had to be quite so beholden to narrative tropes or a tone and pace as relentlessly hyperactive as a migraine-inducing sugar rush. The problem is not with the central metaphor, which, despite its timeworn reliance on human-to-animal transformation, is effective in tying the film’s Chinese mythology to broader experiences of anxiety and difference. Turning Red is most valuable for its candid portrayal of female pubescence, for how it takes an empathically lucid, edifying Inside Out-like approach to making legible the psychic life of its young protagonist. Yet unlike that Pixar touchstone, Shi’s film is infrequently imaginative in either its conception or execution; one would be hard-pressed to find in its perfunctory visual design an idea as elegantly potent as Inside Out’s crumbling personality islands, for instance. The film is also burdened by a murky gender politics, its conceit of a hereditary, exclusively female condition of unruly emotion - figured as monstrous-feminine animality - falling dangerously close to retrograde essentialism. There is no doubt Turning Red comes from a deeply personal, idiosyncratic place, and there is similarly little doubt about how meaningful it will be to audiences young and old and across gender and ethnic lines. But for such potentially groundbreaking subject matter - at least in the context of mainstream American family filmmaking - the results are more banal than inspiring.
