journal features

movie review - Turning Red

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Kokubunji, 2022.04.02

This is a family-friendly animated movie about a girl in Toronto's Chinatown community (the one on Spadina) who discovers that she is heir to a family secret - puberty-onset shape-shifting superpowers. When she gets triggered by her emotions, she turns into a giant anthropomorphic red panda.

Now I adore red pandas since seeing them in a fabulous environment in a Hong Kong zoo. They're interesting because they're not the sleepy one-trick-bamboo eaters that their more famous giant pandas are. They're also far more active. So that was a cute choice, and setting up a mother/daughter show-down as the central story made sense given where the hard-working daughter starts the movie - under her mother's thumb.

What I found interesting was that the high-pressure Asian-Canadian family setting is in stark contrast to the general Canadian population (which I'll lump in together despite Toronto also playing host to sub-cultures that are essentially Korean, Caribbean, Indian, Bengali, Kashmiri, Brazilian/Portuguese, Russian, Farsi/Persian, Filipino, Tagalog, Spanish/Latin, Tamil....) which is depicted as a great deal more relaxed and congenial. Which I suppose is perhaps a trade-off but also comes with things like absentee parents, alcoholism.... Not sure where I'm going with this paragraph but my point is that for a Pixar movie this one is unusually grounded in things that actually occur in people's life. It's a distinct change of pace from the the various Toy Story and Cars and Dori movies, which have a Disney-like unreality to them.

We enjoyed it, and for a Pixar film I bet it would stand up to a second viewing. Unlike, say, Cars.

Recommended.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)