Turning Red and the terror and joy of female adolescence

In the hilarious, deeply insightful Pixar movie Turning Red (directed by Domee Shi, streaming on Disney+), our animated heroine Meilin (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) sketches the likeness of the local mini-mart clerk on the margins of her homework, listing the qualities that are not so bad about him. “His shoulders are kind of nice, I guess; his eyes are fine.” His attractive qualities come to life in her drawing, and almost against her will she ends up under her bed filling page after page with romantic fantasy drawings—Devon as a merman, Devon tenderly staring into her eyes—discovering with increasing glee the power of a first romantic obsession.

Her mother’s assumption that the drawings represent actual events as opposed to fantasies, along with Meilin’s confused shame that she could produce such drawings in the first place, sets in motion one of the most painfully hilarious sequences of the movie. It also encapsulates the main themes the movie explores: the tensions between loyalty to family and burgeoning adolescent independence and how we navigate the messy, painful, joyful parts of ourselves that don’t fit neatly into expectations.

These coming-of-age themes are given a special twist in Meilin’s case, as she discovers that she is afflicted with an ancient curse that turns the women in her family into giant red pandas when they hit puberty. All the usual chaos of adolescence—wild mood swings, awkward bodies, first periods, and awakening sexual desire—are literally externalized in Mei’s panda body, which erupts whenever she feels strong emotions.