MEILIN LEE, the 13-year-old hero of Pixar’s Turning Red, has a lot on her shoulders. She’s maintaining perfect grades alongside responsibilities helping her mom, Ming (Sandra Oh), run Toronto’s oldest Chinese temple. She’s torn between her identities as a dutiful daughter and a socially active teenager. Oh, and she transforms into a giant red panda in times of strong emotion.
That last issue, it turns out, is genetic. Because of a deal made by an ancestor, the women of Meilin’s family all poof into red pandas when they’re angry, sad, or excited, a trait that emerges during puberty. The panda spirit can be contained through a ritual. Ming is desperate to keep her daughter’s red panda spirit under control. Meilin, however, isn’t sure she wants it subdued.
Directed and co-written by Chinese Canadian animator Domee Shi, Turning Red’s fuzzy transfiguration is a metaphor for real-life stressors. There’s the embarrassing physical shift into adulthood, the identity crisis that comes with being the child of immigrants, performance anxiety, and hereditary tendencies.
Meilin and her female relatives’ transformations stand for each of these truths at different points. With Meilin and Ming especially, the red panda represents the messy parts of our personalities that we try to conceal, for fear that we’ll be judged at our worst.
Meilin and her family’s journey to self-acceptance opens the door for us to consider how God’s love encourages compassion toward ourselves and others. As Paul writes in 2 Timothy, “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.” It can take a lifetime of learning to properly nurture what Mary Oliver, in her poem “Wild Geese,” calls “the soft animal of your body.” We are not perfect, but we are always loved, and that knowledge can give us courage.
When Meilin discovers her red panda spirit, she’s horrified, and that fear initially makes her panda spirit destructive. As she learns to control it, Meilin’s panda becomes a source of joy and confidence. This is contrasted with Ming’s long-repressed panda, which becomes a Godzilla-sized rage monster. In both cases, Meilin and Ming’s red pandas are expressions of vulnerability. Over time, they realize their inner creatures (just like our own less-furry inner selves) need to be cared for, not suppressed.
Turning Red is a sweet, relatable reminder that everyone’s lives contain emotional balancing acts. It also makes the extraordinarily kind observation that perhaps we shouldn’t always work so hard to keep ourselves under control. By relying on familial, social, and spiritual support systems, and recognizing how much we are loved, we can be better at loving ourselves.
Abby Olcese is a freelance film critic and writer based in Missouri. You can find her on Twitter @abbyolcese.
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