This article contains minor spoilers for the film Turning Red.

Turning Red, the latest animated film from Disney and Pixar, tells the story of 13-year-old Mei’s adolescence as she breaks out of the parental eggshell. The film, based on director Domee Shi’s lived experience and set in the Canadian city of Toronto in 2002, paints a vivid portrait of life growing up as a female student in an Asian immigrant family. Perhaps that is why the movie feels like a realistic, North American coming-of-age comedy despite being framed as a fairy tale.

Thanks to the low cost of filming there, Toronto has lent itself to numerous movies set in the United States, but it is rare for a film to actually be set in Toronto itself. Shi, who emigrated from China when she was young and settled in the city, reconstructed a realistic portrayal of Toronto throughout the film from her recollection. The streetcar Mei takes from her home in Chinatown to school every day, the CN Tower poking out from the background no matter where the scene is set, the Daisy Mart where Devon—the handsome part-timer Mei and her friends are interested in—works, and the number 15 jersey that Mei’s bully Tyler wears representing legendary Toronto Raptors player Vince Carter are all real symbols of Toronto or things you can find anywhere in the city. That the school and streets are more ethnically and culturally diverse also sets the film apart from American movies as being distinctly Canadian. Everywhere is different, but at least in Toronto, you can see a variety of different nation’s cultures represented in Mei’s school through the clothes people are wearing, like the Punjabi school security guard with a Sikh turban, or Mei’s classmate who wears a hijab. (Given that the movie is set the year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that took place in the US, however, some influence from the suddenly right-leaning US must spilled over into Canada in real life, so it would been almost naive for the people to see the period as overly utopian). Turning Red is not exactly about Toronto, but there is no denying that the distinct character of the city itself greatly influenced the atmosphere of the movie. This is similar to the teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: That movie, too, is not directly about Chicago, but the city is woven in throughout as the protagonist gallivants around the industrial metropolis with friends, using voice recordings and engineering tricks to deceive adults. As in Turning Red, the actions of the film’s protagonist compliment the atmosphere of the city and vice versa.

Turning Red’s score was composed by Swedish musician Ludwig Göransson, one of the most sought-after music directors in Hollywood today. He won an Academy Award in 2019 for his work on Disney/Marvel’s Black Panther, where he combined African instruments and hip hop beats, and he took a similar approach to his work this time around as well. As Turning Red opens, we see Mei playing the flute. The flute melody is meshed together with a new jack swing beat—a subgenre of hip hop popular in the late ’90s and early 2000s—and sets the tone for the whole show. When Mei returns home from school to help her mother, Ming, clean the family temple enshrining their ancestors, the flute smoothly transitions to the five-note scale of East Asian music played on a dizi (a Chinese pipe held horizontally). The flute is believed to be the oldest instrument in all of human history. Mei’s family came to Canada to make a new life for themselves, but the fact that there are similar instruments that span multiple continents shows us how humanity is different but ultimately similar no matter where you go and how the family’s life continues across multiple continents. 

No overview of Turning Red’s music would be complete without mentioning the songs of 4*TOWN, the fictional boy band created especially for the movie. Turning Red is not like other Disney movies, where the characters break into musical numbers in the middle of scenes, but Mei and her friends are liable to start singing 4*TOWN songs at the drop of a hat, whether because they are happy, sad or otherwise. All of the fictional band’s songs were written by siblings Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell. Eilish has made it clear time and time again how enthusiastic she was about teen idols like Justin Bieber when she was growing up. The songs are not trendy the way the theme song for the James Bond movie No Time To Die, which Eilish also wrote, is, but their new jack swing influence, somewhat childish lyrics and simple pop structure fit the atmosphere of the movie perfectly.

2002, the year in which Turning Red is set, was actually the last hurrah for the boy band craze of the late ’90s and early 2000s. It was also the year that Justin Timberlake released his first solo album, Justified, without NSYNC. Boy bands like New Edition and New Kids on the Block were also popular in the 1980s, of course, but for anyone who grew up at the same time Shi did, the boy band craze they remember was led by the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC. During this period, teen pop acts, including those like Britney Spears, were the pinnacle of the pop music scene. In the year 2000, an MTV audition program gave birth to a group called O-Town, which is the likely origin of 4*TOWN’s name (sadly, O-Town never found much popularity). There are also clear homages to both NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys in 4*TOWN’s album art and in their choreography. This was also the time when H.O.T. and SECHSKIES were at the height of their popularity in Korea and everyone was falling in love with SHINHWA and g.o.d. When the main character of Turning Red and her friends finally see the teen idols they have long yearned for in concert, it is hard to miss how their reactions transcend joy and enter the realm of pure ecstasy. The scene provokes empathy and laughter from the audience as it plays out the way any superfan would recognize, with the experience of seeing this kind of massive concert at that age like a life-altering shock to the kids.

Turning Red does not stop at simply resuscitating 2002, making an important change as well: One of the members of 4*TOWN is Tae Young, a Korean boy. Most of the members of the boy bands that were popular in North America and Europe at the time were white; if there were Black performers, they were generally in all-Black groups, whereas Black members in otherwise white boy bands, like Trevor Penick of O-Town (who is multiracial) or Simon Webbe from Blue, were the exception. But it was even harder to find an Asian pop star. Tae Young’s inclusion is likely a reflection of the present, when the idea of a boy band brings K-pop groups like BTS to mind. That Tae Young’s name and character design bear resemblances to BTS members V (the stage name of Taehyung) and Jimin, respectively, did not go unnoticed by fans and was hotly discussed.

Turning Red is a coming-of-age film. In his novel Demian, Hermann Hesse captures the experience in the phrase, “the bird fights its way out of the egg”: we suffer the growing pains of breaking free from the first world that surrounded and nurtured us, and in the process, we grow up. It is true in any family, but there is something distinct about the way it happens in Asian immigrant families like Mei’s. Most immigrants come from the old country with a dream of a better life but also experience economic and social challenges—not to mention culture clashes. These first-generation immigrants focus their efforts toward upward social mobility through their children’s education. Families mobilize every resource at their disposal to help their children earn an education and find high-income occupations in socially prestigious fields. This may not necessarily be true of all immigrant families, but it is certainly a common pattern among Asian families who immigrate to North America, especially those who come from countries like China, Korea and India (just to be clear, I believe I am allowed to say that because I am a typical Asian immigrant myself). With all those resources directed to them, the children end up bearing the weight of the family’s future from a young age. And some children, who can communicate more fluently than their parents who are forced to learn a new language at an older age, are also entrusted with handling major household matters from early on. This, too, differs between families, but in most immigrant homes, once this idea takes root, the kids continue carrying the weight of these tough circumstances, and that burden ends up being shared among family members one way or another. The fight to break out of the shell of that egg is difficult for all children, but for those who grew up in this kind of environment, the act of breaking free can be made that much harder, and especially difficult when they are the only daughter and close with their mother, as in Mei’s case. Because of how much importance she places on receiving praise from her mother, and because she also realizes how dedicated her mother is, Mei chooses to betray her best friends even though they can quell her inner monster.

When viewed from the perspective of Mei’s mother Ming, the film is also about the frustration she feels over her precious only child breaking free from her protection and running off—even at the risk of transforming into a gigantic animal. The film’s director and crew revealed in an interview that Mei’s transformation into a red panda is a metaphor for puberty, but puberty is not the only thing Ming is afraid of. Looking from the perspective of an immigrant who places value on her ethnic heritage, Ming seems to be struggling to accept that her child is beginning to fit in with an outside world separate from her own and becoming Westernized. While the film does not comment directly on this, we can surmise from the way Ming is especially wary of Mei’s white friend Miriam as opposed to Abby or Priya, who are both Asian. The movie never depicts Ming as a perfect person; she loves her daughter more than anything in the world, but she never listens to Mei’s feelings and treats her like a baby who needs to be protected. Mei draws a picture of a boy entirely from her imagination, and her mother demands to know who this fictional boy is. Ming also chews out the teenage part-timer at Daisy Mart completely unprovoked, saying he looks old and blaming that on drugs, which she accuses him of using. She even badmouths Miriam, one of Mei’s closest friends, and denounces the music they like as trash. The mother and daughter pair are very close, but at 13 Mei still cannot express herself openly to her judgmental mother. Shi previously wrote a similar Chinese immigrant mother character in 2018, in the animated short Bao. The woman’s bao dumpling comes to life and she begins to coddle it, continuously meddling in the dumpling child’s everyday life to prevent any danger befalling it, and ultimately destroys it.

The reason behind this sad contradiction between Mei and her mother becomes clear later in the movie: Ming experienced nearly the exact same burden and pains with her own mother. Both Mei and Ming have a problematic child inside who is not allowed to grow up because of the way they were raised. Parents are at once a child’s first world and the first ones they stand up to. In whatever form it takes, teenage rebellion is done in the interest of finding one’s own identity to avoid being molded in the image of their parents alone. Children who never had a chance to rebel, even against the safe parent–child dynamic, are likely to experience difficulty asserting themselves in other relationships after they grow up or cope with issues in unhealthy ways.

A look back on Disney’s animated features of late reveals a number of them address similar strife within families, either between child and parent or intergenerationally. In their 2017 film Coco, the adults in Miguel’s family ban all music after his great-great-grandfather fell in love with it and abandoned his family. The sea monster protagonist in last year’s Luca has conflicts with his parents and dreams of living on land. Encanto, which also came out last year, finds the powerless Mirabel overcoming pain inflicted on the family by her grandmother who is overly preoccupied with keeping their magic alive. Turning Red also highlights the effect Mei’s grandmother, who sees the matrilineal power to transform into a red panda as a curse, had on Mei’s mother, and the effect Ming has on her daughter in turn. In a somewhat disappointing turn, while Ming apologizes to her daughter and then to her mother, the latter only puts a bandage on the issue, saying, “You don’t have to apologize. I’m your mother.” Among the three of them, Mei does the most apologizing. Fortunately, Mei, at least, does not appear to have trouble doing so. The entire healing process begins with Mei’s ability to apologize. It is all too familiar to see the daughter be the only one to apologize in an Asian immigrant family, a point that was unintentionally sad for me, as I can relate.

There was an uproar on Twitter within a week of the release of Turning Red stemming from a review written by film critic Sean O’Connell. In an excerpt posted to Twitter, he said, “Some Pixar films are made for universal audiences. Turning Red is not. The target audience for this one feels very specific and very narrow. If you are in it, this might work very well for you. I am not in it. This was exhausting.” The article immediately sparked outrage. You cannot criticize someone for not feeling immersed in a movie, but a middle-aged white man using his authority as a film critic to spew criticism about the movie not being universal really highlights his self-centered thinking and sense of entitlement. After a flood of condemnation, he deleted his review and made an apology.

Speaking of which, Disney/Pixar’s films have by no means been all that universal. As the majority of them have been fantasies, they often feature anthropomorphized animals and objects and take place in magical versions of the real world, like in the distant future or deep in the ocean. Saying that you can empathize with a fish but not with an Asian girl is essentially the same as admitting you have made a conscious decision that you cannot be bothered to make the least effort toward trying to understand races and genders different from your own. (And Toronto is still an Anglocentric city, so it should not be that different an environment for a white man living in the US.) The same applies beyond the subject matter and to smaller elements of the story. Unlike Andy from the Toy Story series, going to university when you grow up is not a given in every society or class. In Inside Out, the father scolds his daughter, yelling, “Go to your room!”—a punishment that, to some, looks cushy compared to being kicked out of the house. Or what about the dormitory shown in Monsters University: the kind of fraternity house found in Western society or those places influenced by it. Before someone goes around stating with confidence that Disney/Pixar films are universal, maybe they should stop and think whether it is arrogant to define what is typical of the white American middle class as “universal.” We have seen movies centered around the white male experience again and again. You can see that just by looking at the coming-of-age films that are out there; that there are so many classics fitting the description is a testament to just how many have been produced. Non-white, non-male audiences have always willingly undertaken the cognitive labor required of them to sympathize with protagonists who are fundamentally different from them in these and other works. But when the world is already so full of works representing this particular overrepresented identity, it is neither mature nor being a good member of society to grumble when Disney/Pixar makes a single movie that is not centered around you.

One of the most common criticisms of Turning Red upon its release was that it is too “cringeworthy”—“cringey” that the film refuses to correct Mei and her friends’ behavior, which is to say their idol fangirling and their unabashed energy. But critics of the movie were not alone in picking up on this cringeworthiness; fans of the film, too, said they experienced the cringiness. And so did I. When Mei is caught drawing a racy picture by her mother, and then her mother’s invasive behavior drives her into deep humiliation, the audience all hoped that watch they were seeing was a dream, but the story ruthlessly kept on. When do we feel cringey? It is mainly when we feel something deviates from social norms. When the fact that Mei has sexual desires is exposed to strangers against her will, or when she is in class and her mother can be seen through the window being dragged away by the school security guard, both Mei and us as audience members feel cringey. But whereas fans of Turning Red embraced these moments with deep empathy, those critical of the film chalked it up to the immature behavior of a 13-year-old girl. The movie suggests sharing emotions with friends as the secret to controlling this cringiness. A safe space in which one can open up about one’s anxieties and sources of embarrassment acts as a small oasis to relieve your emotions, and the movie seems to be telling us that this is a way that people can mature. Wouldn’t it be sad to miss such an important message because you watched the same movie, found it cringy, and wrote it off as merely the immature, overzealous lives of 13-year-old girls?

On Disney+, Turning Red is accompanied by a making-of documentary. Seeing Shi in the documentary, she strongly resembles both Mei and the atmosphere of the movie. She laughs a lot, breaks into awkward dances unexpectedly, cracks jokes and you can tell she is absolutely in love with her work. Shi confesses she does whatever she wants because she has no sense of shame, but as a creator who came from a culture where people place importance on community-directed shame, not feeling shame is a blessing. Without any thought toward any criticism related to cringiness, Shi depicts a girl who is free and wonderful. In fact, there is a long history of young women being mocked no matter where they are directing their passions. These passionate girls have been shunned for embracing idol culture, decorating their diaries, dressing themselves up—or dressing down. But they rebel on. They start to make cracks in society as their viewpoints show up more and more while they grow up to create stories and do their work everywhere in society, contributing to the creation of a more inclusive, more diverse world. I believe girls who come across such movies when they are young will be able to grow up happier and more confident than our generation did. So it is a serious bummer that Disney/Pixar did not release this movie to theaters widely. How amazing it would have been to see the big screen filled edge to edge with a giant, fluffy red panda!