Pixar’s animated films have become a staple of our popular culture for decades, with new stories that are blazing trails and exceeding fans’ expectations. This weekend, a new title will enter that catalogue — and Disney+ subscribers will be the first to get a chance to check it out. Turning Red will be available on the streaming service beginning this Friday, March 11th, and will be available in theaters in countries that don’t have Disney+. This will be the third film of Pixar’s to head to Disney+ due to the COVID-19 pandemic, after Soul and Luca.
Turning Red introduces Mei Lee (voice of Rosalie Chiang), a confident, dorky 13-year-old torn between staying her mother’s dutiful daughter and the chaos of adolescence. Her protective, if not slightly overbearing mother, Ming (voice of Sandra Oh), is never far from her daughter-an unfortunate reality for the teenager. And as if changes to her interests, relationships and body weren’t enough, whenever she gets too excited (which is practically ALWAYS), she “poofs” into a giant red panda.
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“For us, it was just important not to shy away from all of the awkward, cringey moments and memories that we all had of being a tween,” director and co-writer Domee Shi told ComicBook.com earlier this year. “Moments of being under your bed and going into a lusty drawing spiral in your secret sketchbook, or of magical puberty hitting you in the middle of class of your classroom and your mom horribly embarrassing you. I think for us, if it could give us a visceral reaction in the story room, we knew we had to put it somewhere in the movie. I think, if the whole message of the movie is Mei embracing all of this messy change in her life, her body, her relationship with her mom and her friends, that meant we also had to embrace the mess in our childhood and adolescence as well.”
“From the beginning, it was really important for Domee, and for all of us really, to not represent Mei as broken in any way,” producer Lindsey Collins echoed. “She didn’t need to get fixed. Who you meet in the beginning of the movie is a kid whose confident and dorky and comfortable in her own skin, and has her great relationships with her friends and her parents. So nothing is wrong necessarily, it’s just that when she hits puberty and she turns into the giant red panda, it just throws her whole world upside down. So it was how she’s going to deal with it, and how it affects her relationship with her parents and stuff. I love that. It wasn’t about, “Oh, well, we’re going to take this broken character and fix her by the end of the movie, or we’re going to represent her in a way that feels maybe one-note.” She’s this great, complicated, funny, confident and super likable kid, that’s just going through something that every single [one of us goes through]. She just happens to be going through it in a very magical way.”
As mentioned above, Turning Red will be released on Disney+ on Friday, March 11th. If you haven’t signed up for Disney+ yet, you can try it out here.
