Film Review - Turning Red (2022)

 Turning Red is the new Pixar Animation film and the third in a row to go straight to Disney Plus after Soul and Luca and this story takes place in Toronto in 2002 and concerns Melin (Rosalie Chiang) a young girl who is very much the idol of her mother (Sandra Oh) even if she is over protective of her daughter but one night she suddenly turns into a giant Red Panda and can do so when she becomes overly emotional which if you’re a 13 year old on the cusp of puberty and adolescence its going to be tricky to keep those emotions in check especially as her family undergoes a ritual to rid itself of the beast before it comes too hard to control.

 

Turning Red is not up there with the best of Pixar Animation but it is still a solid enough entry in their library that I had fun with it and first and foremost I have to begin with the group of young girls who anchor this movie, Melin and her friends all like each other, share their affections for themselves and their favourite boyband group 4Town and have a great shorthand with each other and that bond really forms most of the fun this movie gets out of the Panda transformation premise and I enjoyed those scenes a lot.

 

The film also has some good animation which you normally expect from Pixar these days but here it had less of the realistic style to it and more of the bright colours and almost cartoonier style to it especially when it came to the Panda scenes in the film and it serves as a nice reminder for me that animation as an artform can still do those things that live action as advanced as the technology has gotten over the last 3 decades still can’t quite do as well as animation can.

 

Also I have to say that I loved spotting Mr David Lo Pan himself James Hong as one of the family elders.

 

As for the mother/daughter relationship I thought it was pretty good but also a little predictable in terms of the daughter who’s growing up vs the mother who can’t quite accept that just yet though I think some will see more in this than I did overall but I still thought that family relationship worked well in the film.

 

And so that was Turning Red and it’s a good film by Pixar but not one of their best, 3 out of 5.