By: Karla Chatziandreou
Published: March 24, 2022
So the issue for relatability mainly relies on one's personal experience, this is an obvious case for most animated movies, the main issue would be the plot’s unfiltered realism towards the perception on women.
Pixar turned to a new route and brought out a wide array of topics to stuff into a new coming-of-age story–Turning Red. The main plot of the movie is about a 13-year-old teenage girl named Mei, living in Toronto as she attempts to navigate womanhood with her gal pals. Although a big twist changes everything when she soon finds out about her family’s past on red pandas. The “red pandas” are a genetic trait passed down to all the women in the family, it just happens that when they come of age, they physically turn into one. The setting of the entire movie was in the early 2000s and orbits around the illustration of teenage girlhood, family issues, communities, and repressed family history. Although prior, and soon after the movie was released, it sparked numerous controversies and backlash around the internet revolving around the tackled topics that the movie tried to spread awareness about. In addition to the comments, Turning Red kept gaining attention and continued to spiral around a range of claims about its lack of relatability and the depiction of tween girls to be “cringeworthy”, causing an insistent discomfort on the audience.
“What’s stirring the controversy?” – Well, who exactly is the key audience? It is safe to say that the movie targets other tweens and teenagers who are currently experiencing the same thing, not only that but the general population of individuals who could look back on their youth when they themselves were teenagers. Many actually suggest that the movie was an accurate representation of people’s childhood during the early 2000s or how they act like a teenager in the present. So the issue for relatability mainly relies on one's personal experience, this is an obvious case for most animated movies, the main issue would be the plot’s unfiltered realism towards the perception on women.
Turning Red openly shows the media about how growing teenage girls make their way to womanhood, this is considered to be “taboo” as it teaches a whole audience about pads, menstruation, mood swings, and misinterpreted fangirls culture. The movie was said to be “inappropriate” or “sexual” since the female characters obsess over boys, most specifically a boy band called “4town”. People also claimed it to not be “boy-friendly” since it focuses on women’s growth. Despite this fact, at the end of the movie we could see one of the main boy characters; Tyler, going to the 4town concert with Mei and her friends welcoming him to be a “4townie”. This counters the argument of the movie shrugging off its male audience as it teaches a realistic and healthy way of removing gender roles on a child audience–showing that even guys can like a stereotypically feminine thing.
The “Red Panda” actually illustrates the growing nature of a girl when she experiences puberty. The panda appears at a “certain age”, and activates when a girl’s feelings are too stimulated or messy, and most importantly–grown-ups try to calm it down. In real life, women are often labeled as “moody” or “emotional” and as seen in the movie, Mei’s mother Ming tries her best to hide her panda and plans to fully get rid of it with the ritual, therefore rejecting this part of a woman’s side. At the end of the movie, Mei realizes that she wanted to keep her “panda” as she learned that being “crass” or experiencing normal girl things are nothing to be ashamed about. Mei normalizes it within herself with the help of her gal pals who appreciate her and support her dearly panda or no panda.
In conclusion, it’s 2022, we should have normalized these so-called “taboo” topics by now and discrimination against the movie for showing these realistic attributes to children won’t stop it from actually existing. Turning red helps teenage girls feel more comfortable growing up instead of feeling disgusting about it, femininity is not always clean and poised – everybody goes through phases in their life to help them grow. Whether a tween or teenager is of any gender, just like what the movie says “growing up is a beast”.