Full disclosure, your mileage may vary on this one. If you’re the type of person who would happily pay the girls from BROAD CITY to babysit your newly-pubescent kids, then you’ll probably eat this up with a spoon.
If you maybe have some reservations about a pro-narcissism fable being made with the purpose of pushing sex-positivity onto the 10-14 year-old crowd, you might find your viewing experience more wince-inducing than anything else.
It’s also worth noting, dear reader, that I’ve yet to see CARS 2 – which as I understand it is formally recognized as PIXAR’s worst film, but from the one’s I’ve seen (all of them excluding CARS 2) this is easily the worst film they’ve made.
As a Christian who would love to see more high quality Christian films in the world, (like THIS IS MARTIN BONNER, or A HIDDEN LIFE) so many of them commit the same sin PIXAR has here – they start with an agenda, and seemingly reverse-engineer the rest of the story around it.
Technically, PIXAR is only capable of making incredible-looking movies, and in this regard TURNING RED is no exception. The main protagonist, Mei-Mei – who discovers on the eve of puberty that any time she gets too emotional, she’ll turn into a giant red panda (really, a solid comedic premise!) – has fur that looks so real, I felt myself worrying about an allergic reaction.
The movie starts off with a compelling enough push-and-pull between responsibility to one’s family and traditions, and learning how to get comfortable in one’s own skin – but hoo-boy, does this movie dive off the deep end.
There’s a rousing dance number at the beginning (and in the background of the credits) that’s basically a teeny-bopper version of Sinatra’s “My Way,” and the whole time, I thought to myself that she’d end up growing up over the course of the film and learning how to embrace personal responsibility and moderate her own self-control. Not so! I’m afraid this is yet another tiresome case of the Disney-message that kids are not the one’s that need to change, but that it’s the adults/parents that need to get in line.
There’s another scene in which Mei-Mei is talking about her family’s religion and how they “don’t worship God” but that they worship their ancestors “even the girl ones” – it’s one thing to make a movie like MULAN, or even the more recent COCO and ENCANTO that seek merely to expose cultural/spiritual perspective to a wider audience, but TURNING RED isn’t satisfied with merely doing that – it wants to dunk on Traditional Christian values – an extremely weird flex, when – at the end of the film, in a frankly bizarre twist, the film seems to assert that the best thing about religion is how one can monetize it. Truly baffling when the movie starts off extolling the virtues of why “Religion A is better than Religion B.”
Top all this off with a panda, literally evoking the phrase “My panda, my choice” in the closing moments – and you’ve got yourself a movie in which the only thing that’ll be TURNING RED are the cheeks of parents who thought they were bringing their children to a reliably excellent, and inclusive, PIXAR Film.
Currently streaming on Disney+
(** out of *****)
D I S C E R T A I N M E N T 