Disney Pixar’s all new original animated film Turning Red, follows Meiling Lee, a dorky confident Chinese-Canadian girl as she goes through the awkward transitory phase between childhood and her teen years. Told through Mei Lee’s perspective, this coming-of-age story has a very important twist — every time her emotions fluctuate or she gets excited, she turns into a giant red panda — and being a 13-year-old girl, there is no shortage of things for her to get emotional about. From boy bands and pop music, to her friendships and the process of forming her own identity as she steps out of her overbearing mother’s shadow, she is poofing into a red panda left and right.
It's a charming story, but the themes in it are far from made up. The journey we see Mei Lee navigate throughout the film is a story inspired by 33-year-old director Domee Shi’s real life and her relationship with her own mother. A prevalent theme in her work, Domee’s previous project, 2018's beloved short film Bao, which won her an Academy Award, also deals with a complicated first-generation immigrant mother-child relationship, something that we as Latinos can deeply relate to. “As I was promoting Bao, a lot of people kept asking me: Why is Bao a boy?” Domee said in a previous interview. Her response? “Because I only had eight minutes to tell the story! For a mother-daughter story, I needed an entire feature film to unpack that.”
With Bao telling this layered story from the mother’s perspective, Domee had the chance to flip the script with Turning Red, her feature debut, and approach these themes from the child’s point of view while diving into the infinitely more complicated mother-daughter relationship.
Growing up as a Chinese-Canadian in the early 2000s, the story behind Turning Red is very close to home for Domee. Like Mei Lee, she was an only child whose family moved to Toronto from her hometown in China when she was only 2 years old. She describes her experience growing up saying she was always very close with her parents and spent a lot of time with her mom since her father traveled often for work. “We did everything together," Domee said during a recent press conference. "We commuted together to work and to school in downtown Toronto and went on mother/daughter bus trips and vacations together.”
Similar to the evolution we see Mei Lee go through in the film, Domee mentions that as she entered her teen years, she discovered new hobbies, friends and interests, forming her own identity apart from what had been instilled by her mom and their family culture, something that most first-generation kids can relate to. This caused growing pains for the two as Domee felt torn between her path to find her own sense of self and the feeling of duty and loyalty she felt for her parents and her mother.
Domee has also worked on recent fan-favorites including Inside Out, The Good Dinosaur, Toy Story 4, and Incredibles 2. On Turning Red, Domee, the studio’s first female solo director, spearheaded Pixar’s first all-female leadership team who each brought their own experiences from their teen years and parental struggles to this passion project.
The group of creatives included producer Lindsey Collins, a longtime Pixar veteran, production designer Rona Liu, who also worked on Bao, co-writer Julie Cho, and cinematographer-turned VFX supervisor Danielle Feinberg who has worked on iconic Pixar films including Coco, Ratatouille and Finding Nemo.
Working with an all-female team, Domee mentioned that she had a certain understanding and shorthand with her fellow collaborators since they each drew from their own lived experiences as 13-year-old girls, with story sessions turning into an exchange of hilarious retellings of their own childhoods and their relationships with their moms.
With Domee Shi pouring so much of herself into this project, it brings to life an authentic story that all bicultural kids can relate to. Watching this film with your kids is bound to bring perspective to those moments we’ve all felt at some point when it seems we’re being torn in two different worlds especially during adolescence. Don’t miss Turning Red only on Disney+ this March 11!
