Turning Red Director and Producer Promoted to New Roles at Pixar

Two of the creative forces behind Pixar’s latest hit are being promoted within Pixar Animation Studios. On Tuesday, it was reported that Turning Red director Domee Shi and producer Lindsey Collins will be taking on new leadership roles within the company. Shi has been promoted to vice president of creative, and will join directors Andrew Stanton, Peter Sohn, and Dan Scanlon in guiding the studio’s filmmakers as part of the Pixar Braintrust. Meanwhile, Collins will now be operating as the senior vice president of development, where she will lead Pixar’s development group for features and streaming. 

Shi began at Pixar as an intern, before serving as a story artist on Inside Out and working on The Good Dinosaur, Incredibles 2, and Toy Story 4. She won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short for her 2018 Pixar short Bao, before making her feature directorial debut with Turning Red and becoming the first woman to ever serve as the solo director on a Pixar feature.

Collins, meanwhile, has been with the studio for nearly 25 years, working on projects such as WALL-E and Finding Dory. She previously served as the vice president of development, where she helped launch Pixar’s SparksShorts program.

“As I reflect on my 25 years at Pixar, the pride and gratitude I have is surpassed only by the excitement I feel stepping into this new role,” Collins said in a statement. “Pixar has always been a place that seeks to delight and surprise audiences and I am thrilled to be able to expand on that legacy and help shape what comes next, surrounded by some of the most diverse, unique and inspiring filmmakers and voices working today.”

Turning Red became a bonafide hit for Pixar and Disney when it debuted last month, with it reportedly having the top film premiere in Disney+ history. The film follows Meilin “Mei” Lee (Rosalie Chang), a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl growing up in Toronto in the early 2000s who begins to undergo puberty, which causes her to literally “poof” into a giant red panda when she gets excited or stressed out. The film previously made headlines for having the first all-female leadership team within Pixar.

“It was conversations about this character and about what she’s going through and all the painful and awkward moments,” Collins explained in a previous interview with ComicBook.com. “Those were all shared experiences at our level. So it was something that, I think, allowed Domee and our writer and the rest of the team to just be really bold, and to not second guess those choices in the story. When we were going through the massive iterations, we didn’t, by mistake, water it down internally. I think that’s really cool, that we had this very different tone of a film, and it was a tone that was totally supported by common experience, frankly.”

Turning Red is now available to stream exclusively on Disney+.