Hi everyone. I'm Em, and welcome to bubble diorama, episode 282, turning red. This is the podcast that's all about the history and legacy of movies you know and movies you don't. That'll never not be your ride or die. Welcome to Verbal Diorama. Whether you are a brand new listener, whether you are a regular returning listener, thank you for being here. Thank you for choosing to listen to this podcast. I'm so happy to have you here for the history and legacy of Turning Red. And a huge happy new year to you all. It is now 2025, and because it's the start of 2025, that means a huge welcome to Animation Season 2025. This is the fifth annual Animation Season. It is a celebration of animation in all forms. Traditional, 2D, hand drawn, stop motion, CGI. A mix of all of the above, featuring some of the greatest animation studios of all time. I've covered on this podcast, movies by Leica, Aardman, Disney Dreamworks, Pixar, Studio, Ghibli, Cartoon Saloon, even the studios that no longer exist, like Fox Animation, Don Bluth Studios Animation is not just for children. Animation is not a genre. It is the perfect art form. It is capable of depicting anything and anyone without the limitations of live action cinema. This is one of the reasons why animation season is so important to me, especially because I want to highlight incredible animated films that you may have discounted for whatever reason, but you're missing out on some incredible visuals and storytelling. And that's why I love to do this animation season every January and February. And this year, even if I do say so myself, there are some absolute doozies in the schedule. Movies I get asked about when I'm doing animated cult favorites, Oscar nominees, Oscar winners, movies that I think deserve a bit more love. And Turning Red is one such movie. But as Always. I'm hugely grateful to everyone who listens to this podcast and has continued to listen to and support this podcast. This podcast is almost six years old. It turns six next month in February. I have now achieved over 280 episodes on this podcast and I honestly could not do it without the continued support of everyone listening. 2025 is here. Bizarrely, time just keeps ticking away. But we were all a teenager once. We may not want to remember those times, but we were all 13 once upon a time. And we all know what an absolute hellscape it was to be a teenager. Now, I can't comment on the experience of being a 13 year old boy because I never was a 13 year old boy. However, I was once a 13 year old girl. And this movie to me just encapsulates everything I felt about being a 13 year old girl in the 90s. But without further ado, let's jump into the first episode of Animation Season 2025 of Verbal Diorama. In 2025, it's time for the red peony to bloom. Here's the trailer for Turning red.

Meilin Lee. A confident and ambitious 13 year old Chinese Canadian girl is navigating adolescence in Toronto. May struggles to balance her responsibilities as a dutiful daughter to her overprotective mother, Ming, with her growing desire for independence. One day, Mei discovers she transforms into a giant red panda whenever she experiences strong emotions, a phenomenon tied to a mystical family curse. Initially mortified by her newfound condition, Mei learns to embrace her Panda, finding joy and confidence in her unique abilities. As Mei and her friends embark on fundraising schemes to attend the 4 TAM concert, her favorite boy band, tensions rise between May's personal desires and her mother's strict expectations. Let's run through the cast of this movie. We have Rosalie Chang as Meilin Lee, Sandra oh as Ming Lee, Eva Morse as Miriam Mendelsohn, Mitreyi Ramakrishnan as Priya Mandal, Hyen park as Abby Park, Orion Lee as Jin Lee, Wai Ching Ho as Wu Tristan, Alaric Chen as Tyler Wen Baker and James Hong as Mr. Gao turning red has a screenplay by Julia Cho and Domee Shi, a story by Domee Shi, Julia Cho and Sarah Stryker, and was directed by Domee Shi So as I mentioned, this is the first episode of animation season 2025 and like last year, I'm starting with a Pixar movie. Last year I started with Wally and some of the crew on this movie started out on Wall E. This one is more modern. It came out during the Pandemic and it suffered commercially for that. But cards on the table, Turning Red is very much my movie because I, like 49.6% of the world's population, have experience being a teenage girl starting puberty, getting my first period and feeling like a disgusting red beast. Turning Red was the last of the Pixar pandemic movies that ended up on Disney plus instead of getting a full cinema release. But none of them, Onward, Soul and Luca, suffered financially as much as Turning Red did. Now, the fact that Lightyear came out a few months later and made ten times as much money always felt like a bit of a travesty to me because this movie, in my humble opinion, is way better than Lightyear. Turning Red deserves better. Turning Red gets to kick off Animation Season 2025 in style. We get to embrace the Panda Four Town forever, with the four in forever being the number four, because that's how we did it in the early 2000s. And at the heart of this movie is writer director Dongmi Shi. She was born in China. She immigrated to Canada with her parents when she was 2 years old. Like Mei, she's an only child. She interned at Pixar in 2011 after graduating from Sheridan College and after being her high school's vice president of the Anime Club, Obviously. She also uploaded her fan artwork to DeviantArt. She was initially turned down for a Pixar internship, but applied again on the advice of her father and got the internship and was eventually offered a full time job at the studio. The first movie she worked on was Inside out as a storyboard artist. She also worked as a story artist on the Good Dinosaur Toy Story 4 and as additional story artist on Incredibles 2. But her passion project was none of those Things. It was Bao. She started sketching Bao in 2014 and began working on it as a side project. She based it on her experiences of growing up as an only child and being, quote, an overprotected little steamed bun. End quote. She was also inspired by traditional dark folk tales and children's stories, as well as Studio Ghibli's My Neighbors, the Yamadas and Spirited Away. Bao was pitched to Pete Docter and approved as a Pixar short in 2015, making she the first woman to direct a short film for Pixar, the first time in 35 shorts for the studio. Bao premiered at the Tribeca film festival in April 2018, featured before Incredibles 2 in cinemas, and she also became the first woman of color to win the Academy Award for Best Animated short film for Bao. But Donu Xi wasn't done with those firsts. On 31st October 2017, she was invited to pitch three ideas to Pixar. After the success of Bao, all were coming of age stories centered on teenage girls, and the winning pitch was about magical puberty, centered around a Chinese Canadian mother and daughter, and Pete Docter, as Pixar's new chief creative officer, wanted more stories from personal experiences and from minority groups. This shift started with Luca, which had long been seen as a metaphor for not only puberty and feeling like an outsider, but also the experience of being lgbtq. Director Enrico Casarosa's biographical coming of age story was never seriously discussed as being a canonically queer story during the making of Luca, but it's since being adopted as such by the LGBTQ community. And even if it's not canonically queer, if it speaks to queer people, then it speaks to queer people. But Luca really heralded the change for more biographical stories, and the product of that change, led by Domee Shi, which was then called Red, was announced in May 2018 as the first full length Pixar movie to be solely directed by a female director and a woman of color. The film's lead creative team would also be the first all female team for Pixar, including producer Lindsay Collins, who joined the studio in 1997 and co produced Wally, produced Finding Dory, and also production designer Rona Liu, who'd worked with Domee Shi On Bao, they were all encouraged to tap into their tween selves and embrace those beautifully blundering memories, those cringy crushes and those adolescent obsessions. The look of Turning Red would take the symbolism of the Chinese culture Domee Shi grew up with, as well as the anime she watched and the manga she drew and loved as a child, as well as the awkward hormones growing up lusting after boy bands and, well, all the red Red would mean more than the obvious period talk. Red is the main color of both the Canadian and Chinese flags. Red is also a lucky color in China, associated with good fortune and joy. A hong bao, a red envelope stuffed with money, is the usual gift in Chinese communities for Chinese New Year, birthdays, marriages and other special occasions, as well as the red panda native to China. They are cute, they are cuddly and fluffy, they're very close to their mothers, they sleep all day and they eat food that's not nutritious enough for them, just like teenagers. The team studied red pandas at the San Francisco Zoo, where a red panda was named May Lee in honor of the main character in Turning Red on the movie's day of release. Some of the other title ideas for the movie include Primal of Life, Bet on Red Red Reflections, Peony Blossom, Panda Prime Red and Redder the Red Inside, PMS Panda Mayhem Story, Big Burden, Notorious rpg, Red Panda Girl and and a Panda. I'm actually a big fan of Notorious rpg. I think that's a great title. The movie takes place in Toronto, but it was actually San Francisco's Chinatown that served as a design inspiration. And while the production visited several Chinese temples for design inspiration for the Li family temple, it was the Bok Kai Temple in Marysville, California that served as the main point of reference for for the Li family temple. Built in 1880, it is the only in situ 19th century Chinese temple in the United States that is still active. And this movie is also set in 2002. When phones flipped, you burned CDs for friends and yes, Tamagotchis was still a thing. It was coming to the end of being a thing. But looking after virtual pets was literally your first attempt at keeping something alive. And they died really easily. Mine did anyway, except mine was never an official Tamagotchi. But yes, I had flip phones and I still have CDs that my friends burned for me all those years ago because I just do not want to get rid of them. I do not want to throw them away because they are so nostalgic. The design team turned to the 2D look of anime as the driving stylistic force for turning red. This meant tweaking the hyper realistic norm at Pixar to fit their vision, bending the way they did, modeling, shading and lighting to be more graphic. Using anime influences like Doraemon, sailor moon, ranma, 1/2 fruits basket and inuyasha. My neighbor Totoro's Totoro inspired the look of red Panda Mei and unsurprisingly, Studio Ghibli also inspired the delicious looking food that Mei's father is cooking. They learned on Bao about the textual and light response to the food. The shape can be stylized, but the shading response has to be realistic. Meat needs to look like meat. The way the light passes through leaves has to look real in order for viewers to have that connection that this is food that and they slather everything in oil. And when they can't do that on lettuce for example, they use what the food ad industry does and saturate the colors so the lettuce's green was greener than lettuce usually is and added a bright white watery gloss to evoke freshness. The cultural consultants for the food in the film was Gold House, a non profit organization that specializes in promotion of East Asian and Pacific cultures, who explained the first immigrants in Toronto's Chinatown weren't just Cantonese, but Tai Chanese. And so they went with culturally accurate foods like eel, rice, snow peas, steamed fish and seafood soup. They studied the watercolors and shape language of anime and also referenced live action films, especially Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, which is also set in Toronto, which is also heavily influenced by anime and video games. The entire process required significant software retooling and changes in order to translate the graphic anime style into computer generated graphics. This included changing the tone of pastel backdrops to help the figure stand out, adding color, variety and staining to the materials, making the Chinatown buildings appear chunky with pointy rooftops that resembled cat ears and producing a pink mist cloud to heighten fantasy scenes for more graphic expressiveness of characters. Eyes, size and shape were altered and stars added. The biggest part of the movie, of course, was Panda, Mei Mei's alter ego. And Panda May had her own set of unique problems. This was a new beast. Excuse the pun. Even though Pixar had long before conquered fur with Monsters Inc. And improved it exponentially ever since. At first, working with Huge and Fluffy seemed counterintuitive and the chunky, adorable shape was awkward. Pandemey's movements and facial Expressions had to be carefully considered while maintaining her appearance and character as Mei. They actually shrunk Panda Mei 10 to 15% in interior spaces so she could move, interact and not intersect with other parts of the set. And the reason Panda Ming is so large and basically becomes a Kaiju is because her emotions have been suppressed for so long and are so out of control and her panda is huge and destructive. Ming is very traditional Chinese. Her clothing and jewelry is traditional and mirrors her own mother's traditional style, which demonstrates the influence her mother had on her and the expectations of her mother passed down to her, which she is now trying to pass down to May. And obviously much of this production took place with people working remotely during the COVID 19 pandemic, including some of the voice work. They did regular zoom chats and coffee breaks once or twice a week to keep the crew connections going. These chats included dogs, cats, kids and babies. Visual effects supervisor Danielle Feinberg became a mother to twins during production and being able to work from home during that period was time with her children that you just can't get back. 16 year old Rosalie Chiang, who played May coincidentally once gave a presentation on red pandas to her fifth grade class four years prior. She just started her acting career when she was given the chance to try out for the part. She was invited to an in person interview at Pixar's Emeryville offices after using her mother's iPhone to audition when she was 12 years old. Because she was local, she was hired to record scratch vocals which are short term audio tracks that will eventually be replaced by a professional voice actor. It's a common practice in animated filmmaking because the process is often years long and involves a huge team of producers, writers, animators, and you have various script revisions, visual renderings and multiple of the steps of the process that can change. The productions hired temporary voices to help find the character before a professional comes in. After auditioning professional actors for May, Domee Shi and Lindsey Collins discovered that they had already fallen in love with Rosalie Chiang's scratch vocals and they couldn't imagine anyone else playing May even after listening to a number of auditions. Chiang was natural dorky and they just felt she embodied Mei. They brought the matter to the attention of Pete Docter, the chief creative officer of Pixar, who personally gave his approval for Chiang to play the movie's protagonist. To tell Chiang that she'd actually been cast as May for the movie, she and Collins brought in a camera crew during a day of line reading at the beginning of 2020, telling Chiang it was for a behind the scenes documentary, but instead they filmed Line reading a new page of script with she reading as Ming Mei's mother, who tells Qiang as Mei that she'd got the part of Mei for real. It would be the final time that she and Collins saw Chiang in real life. Because then the pandemic happened and to keep production going, everyone went to work from home and Pixar sent Chiang some audio equipment, but it took up so much room in her house that her parents had to fashion a makeshift recording studio. And when it came to casting Mei's mother, Ming, Sandra oh was Domee Shi's number one choice for me. She was most famous for Grey's Anatomy, which earned her a Golden Globe, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and five consecutive Primetime Emmys for Best Supporting Actress in a drama. And also Killing Eve as the titular eve. In 2018, O became the first actress of Asian descent to be nominated for the Primetime Emmy award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama series for Killing Eve, and she also became the first woman of Asian descent to win two Golden Globes. Sandra oh is awesome, but they also wanted someone who could be a nurturing, loving mother, but also sharp and intimidating. And honestly, I think Sandra oh absolutely kills it in this movie. I want her to be my mother, but I also don't want her to be my mother. But one of the things that I think really sticks out for me in this film is something else that we did in the early 2000s and also in the 90s as well, and that was boy bands. And just like May, I was obsessed with certain boy bands, starting with New Kids on the Block, then Backstreet Boys, Boyzone. I was never really into take that, NSYNC A1 5. I still enjoy the music as well. I never did like Westlife. My crushes. There was no Robert, but Nick Carter from the Backstreet Boys, Ronan Keating from Boiseau, and Richie Neville from five. And I guess it was always the cute blonde guys that teenage me liked. I'm not really so much into blonde guys these days, but I had the posters. I went to concerts. My first concert was a Boyzone concert with my best friend at the time, Lisa. Lisa. And I loved Boyzone. I know Lisa sometimes has listened to this podcast in the past, so. Hi Lisa, if you're listening, my Backstreet Boys bestie was my friend Aisha. We never went to see them, but Aisha and I talked about the Backstreet Boys all the time. Basically, what I'm saying is boy bands and the love of boy bands fostered genuine friendships for me as a teenager. One of the many reasons Turning Red speaks to young teenage me and the experience of so many young women who grew up in the 90s and the 2000s, just like May, the immigrant experience, obviously I have zero experience with. But being a teen girl obsessed with boy bands, yep, that was me. But despite the way that this movie gets boy bands, absolutely 100% correct is the fact that this movie hits me hard by speaking to the experience of literally half of the population. So the fact is, directed, written by and produced by a team of women, the first all female senior team at Pixar just makes so much sense because this is a movie by women, for women predominantly. But it's also a coming of age story about a young girl who turns into a red panda. And honestly, if you can relate to Bruce Banner becoming Hulk when he's angry, then you can relate to being an awkward teen with all sorts going on in your body. Even Pete Docter described May's situation in the movie as the Hulk, but cuter when presenting it at D23 in 2021. And let's just talk about the giant red panda in the room. Periods. For such a long time it was taboo to talk about periods, despite the fact that almost every female goes through it. It was so taboo that it was only almost 40 years ago in 1985, when Courteney Cox, then advertising Tampax tampons, uttered the word period on tv. She was the first person to say that word on American TV. It was only 2017 when body form replaced the blue liquid used to simulate period blood in ads with a more realistic red liquid. And even then I remember that being met with disgust and shame, even from actual women. The stigma around periods is still there. It's getting better, but it's still there. The notion that pads are unhygienic, which has led to some supermarkets rebranding the feminine hygiene aisle to period products, which also makes it inclusive because non binary people also get periods and so do trans men. Nothing about periods is unhygienic. If you have a tween girl in your life, talk openly and honestly about menstruation. Periods are normal. Let's stamp out these taboos like giant red pandas. The fact this movie has that analogy and it uses it so openly and honestly and features pads so prominently in a mainstream Pixar movie is frankly about damn time and the studio heads at Pixar. Embracing this very normal part of life for so many is really refreshing because if you don't experience it, chances are you know someone who will, who does, or who has. And that also may be one of those reasons that this movie didn't seem to do very well, and that this movie doesn't seem to resonate with so many people. Because maybe people find that particular topic alienating, but them's the facts of life. So if it's something that you are personally afraid of or ashamed of or worried about, do your research. If you don't want to watch this movie because of that reason, maybe ask yourself, well, what am I so afraid of about a completely normal thing that happens to, like I said, a lot of people in this world? And if Turning Red does anything, as far as I'm concerned, not only does it give you that picture perfect moment in a teenager's life and makes it fun and funny and honest and approachable, it also takes this topic that some see still as taboo and makes it very normal by making it mystical. Which is strange, but it works. Speaking of normal but mystical, let's move on to the obligature Keanu reference for this episode, and if you don't know what that is, it's where I try and link the movie that I'm featuring with Keanu Reeves. Now this is obviously a very tricky one because Keanu Reeves, although I expect a lot of people, had a crush on him in 2002, myself included, I didn't really want to go down that route because as far as May's concerned, her crush is Robert from Four Town. But then I found this really wonderful slash weird link to the movie, and that is that there is a fur suitor called Keanu the Red Panda who lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He is the self proclaimed local furry community leader for the Chattanooga the Nougat area and when he's not a red panda, he's James Lavelle Thompson. Now he's also been accused of degree fraud and spreading misinformation about the pandemic. So really he's not particularly someone that I wanted to mention because Keanu Reeves is of course the best of men. However, it is the easiest way to link Keanu Reeves to this movie which has a red panda in it, by mentioning Keanu the Red Panda who is the self proclaimed local furry community leader for Chattanooga. And as I mentioned, the boy band connection is so good. And it's even better when you consider that the people behind the songs of Four Town are not actually a boy band themselves, but it is Billie Eilish and her brother Phineas O'Connell. They wrote the songs, performed by May's favorite band, Four Town. The titles of the tracks in all of their early 2000s glory are one true love, you Know what's up and Nobody but you. Obviously the U is always the letter U and not the word u. Phineas sings on the tracks and voices Jesse, one of the members of the band. It's remarkable really, that neither were old enough to remember true 90s 2000s boy band culture, and yet the songs are pitch perfect. Domi Sheen managed to get Billie Eilish and Phineas O'Connell aboard when Eilish was starting to come to fame at the start of production and the songs were recorded in late 2020. The rest of four town consisted of Jordan Fisher, Josh Levi, Grayson Villanueva and Topher no. The song Nobody like you was released on 25 February 2022, two weeks before the film's release, and peaked number 49 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Song Written for Visual Media. It would lose to Lin Manuel Miranda's We Don't Talk About Bruno, which is interesting because, well, I can't talk about it just now. Four Town is called Four Town despite having five members purely because four is an unlucky number in Chinese culture and the production team knew that this would add to Ming's distrust of the music. It was important that the movie took the boy band seriously and not treat them as a throwaway thing because for the fans of these boy bands they are most definitely not a throwaway thing. The score was by Ludwig Goransson in his first animated film project and was recorded within a two week period after COVID 19 lockdown relaxations. Special screenings of Turning Red were held in Toronto on 8 March 2022 and in London on 21 February 2022. On 1 March 2022 it had its debut at Hollywood's El Capitan Theatre. Now Walt Disney Studios initially planned for it to be released in theaters in the United States on 11 March 2022 after soul and Luca were given direct to streaming premieres on Disney because of the pandemic. A Pixar Source confirmed in June 2021 that Turning Red would be released in theaters on 7 January 2022. However, its theatrical premiere was canceled for a direct to streaming release on Disney as a Disney original due to the increase of the COVID 19 omicron variant at the time. It did debut in cinemas in other countries in 2022 including Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, Australia and New Zealand. On 5 December 2023, it was announced that Turning Red, Soul and Luca would finally get a theatrical release in the United states in early 2024, with Turning Red being released on 9th February 2024. Turning Red also released here in the UK on 9th February 2024 alongside releases in Mexico and Spain when it did actually go direct to streaming on Disney plus as a Disney original title, Turning Red was streamed in 2.5 million US households over its opening weekend, at the time the most ever for a Disney plus original title, and became the second most watched movie on US streaming services in 2022 with 11.4 billion minutes viewed. For the limited release it did have in cinemas across the world, it would return $1.4 million domestically in the US and $20.4 million internationally, for a total worldwide gross of $21.8 million. Now its budget was $175 million, so it kind of didn't really make any of its money back and technically it is seen as one of the biggest flops ever. But but Turning Red did receive critical acclaim on Rotten Tomatoes. It has a 95 rating, with the consensus reading heartwarming, humorous, beautifully animated and culturally expansive, Turning Red extends Pixar's long list of family friendly triumphs. It did, however, receive a particularly scathing review from CinemaBlend's Sean O'Connell, who suggested the movie's focus on a Chinese Canadian teenage girl to be limiting to the audience at large. Quote by rooting Turning Red very specifically in the Asian community of Toronto, the film legitimately feels like it was made for Domee Shi's friends and immediate family members, which is fine, but also a tad limiting in its scope, unquote. Social media found this review and immediately called it racist and sexist, with even lead actress Rosalie Chiang highlighting there was a coming of age story and relatable to everyone in some capacity, regardless of your culture. As a result, CinemaBlend's editor in chief Mac Rawdon pulled O'Connell's review and apologized publicly for it, and that the site had failed to properly edit the review before posting. O'Connell also posted his own apology for the review. Turning Red was also nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards, Best Animated film at the BAFTAs, and the best Animated Feature Film at the Golden Globes. It would lose to Guillermo del Torres Pinocchio for all three, that is episode 239 of this very podcast. It was also nominated for seven Annie Awards and also lost the majority of those also to Pinocchio. But we don't mind because Pinocchio is pretty much a masterpiece. Domy, she told Polygon in an interview quote, the red panda is a metaphor not just for puberty, but also what we inherit from our mums and how we deal with the things that we inherit from them. Turning red is a huge step forward for female representation on screen, and it works hard to destigmatize and have a frank conversation about the experiences of women and girls. Which brings me to why animation season is so important. Animation is a powerful tool. Not only is it a beautiful medium of filmmaking, it can also help in our processing of difficult subjects. Subjects that live action filmmaking may find too harsh or real to handle in a way that is palatable. Animation is a universal language. It's understood by small children all the way up to elderly people. Talking to family members about puberty, growing apart, growing up or intergenerational trauma may be difficult, but watching an animated movie together and experiencing those common human emotions is simple. It's easy and it's immersive. Using metaphors for extreme emotions isn't new, but just like other Pixar movies like Coco is a palatable way to introduce children to death and what death means and inside out, giving personality to our emotions. Turning red takes something normal and makes it magical and let's be honest, it's rubbish to go through. But that feeling doesn't last that long and periods just become a normal, everyday part of being a person with a uterus. As is, trust me, the disdain for whatever gender you happen to fancy until a certain point in time when they're all you can think about. Everyone talks about embracing your inner child, remembering how it felt to be a kid the first time you met Santa Claus and sat on his lap, or the first time the tooth fairy visited. But no one ever tells you to embrace your teenage years. The zits, the awkwardness. Maybe you wore braces and you hated them, the bad fashion choices, feeling out of place at school or misunderstood by your family. It's hard to look back on those years with fond memories, but they were formative to you, becoming the hopefully well grounded individual you are today. I can understand the concern about parents maybe wanting to have these conversations that out puberty, hormones, etc with their children on their own terms and in their own time. But so many parents just don't know how to broach the subject. How open to be. I think I might have benefited from watching a movie like this as a teenager and just being able to ask the questions and not be so ashamed about it all. And it's still a shame that needs to be addressed. I've seen criticisms about this movie's lack of metaphorical focus, especially when May embraces her panda at the end, but to be honest, I don't think it needs to be taken so literally. Mei respects her family and her culture, but she chooses to take a different path to her mother, aunts and grandmother. She's expected to renounce the panda because that's tradition, but traditions don't always need to be followed, and as a Chinese Canadian girl growing up in Canada as opposed to China, she can respect her heritage and go her own way. Feeling trapped by parental expectations is also a pretty universally understood theme. All parents want the best for their children to do better than they did. I don't have children, but I've fallen into the same traps that many do for my nieces and nephews, having expectations that one day they'll become astronauts, doctors, or theoretical physicists because I never achieved any of those things. So of course I want them to. If they don't, and they're happy doing whatever it is they end up doing, then of course I'll be happy with that. But similarly, if they need my assistants to get into Oxbridge, then of course I'll do it. I've seen a lot of discourse online about this movie, especially on Reddit with people merely hating on it. Maybe I'm biased as a person who just got this movie, but I also love the unique animation style, the anime influences, the clear homage to Studio Ghibli, and the passion behind the scenes. Is Ming Yi a bit much? Yeah, she's the exaggerated mother slash villain and it doesn't always work, but parents do embarrass us, and in our minds as a teenager, it is way worse than it actually is. Domee Shi is a talented filmmaker, an inspiration to all us nerdy girls who maybe daydreamed a little too much when we were teenagers. She's co directing Elio for Pixar next and that comes out next year. I also love the period 2002 setting, but again, that's not going to work for anyone born in the 2000s. All in all, Turning Red may not be your favorite Pixar movie, and it's certainly not mine because that's still the Incredibles. But it's a step in the right direction for a studio that has seemingly lost its way a little from the halcyon days of Toy Story, Wall E, Inside Out Monsters Inc. And Coco. Personal stories might be personal, but they're also relatable. And Turning Red really struggled without getting that cinema release. It may have been a risk for Pixar, but Pixar should take more risk, as should Hollywood in general. Let's be honest, puberty might be the one most relatable thing that humans go through. Turning Red would be remarkable just for that one fact alone. And yet here we also are with Pixar's first solo female director, first female director of color, first Asian led story by Pixar, and Pixar's first all female senior production team. Turning Red breaks barriers. It's a story about Asian families, Asian cultures with Asian representation on and off screen, but it remains a universally understood story. I relate to. May I weirdly also relate to Ming just wanting to protect her child. We've all had weird crushes and drawn those horrible, awful, sexy things. I like boys and loud music. I like Joy rating. Deal with it. But also everyone go home, where are your parents? And put some clothes on. Thank you for listening. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on Turning Red. Thank you for your continued support of this podcast and once again, Happy New Year to you all. If you want to get involved and you want to help this podcast grow, you can. You could leave a rating or review wherever you found this podcast. You can find me on social media, I am @VerbalDiorama, on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram threads, Blue sky and Letterboxd. You can find posts, you can share posts, you can like posts. It all helps. Or you can simply tell your friends and family about this podcast if you like this episode on Turning Red. I've also done previous episodes on a few different Pixar movies actually, but the two that I thought most feel like companions for this episode, probably episode 75, which is on Coco, and episode 188, which is on Inside Out. So the next episode we talk about Bruno? No, no, no. Or maybe we do because it's time for more generational trauma with Disney's Encanto coming up next. This animation season I've done a Pixar movie, so it makes sense to do a Disney movie next. Join me next week for the history and legacy of Encanto. Now, this podcast is free and it always will be free. However, it is not free to make a podcast. I rely on the incredibly generous support of some wonderful people who support this podcast financially. Now, you are under no obligation to do the same. However, if you do have some spare pennies and you do get value out of what I do on Verbal Diorama you can support the show financially in one of two ways. You could go to verbaldiorama.com tips and give a one off tip. Or you can go to verbaldiorama.Com Patreon and you can join the amazing patrons of Herbal Diorama. They are Sade, Claudia, Simon, Laurel, Derek, Kat, Andy, Mike, Luke, Michael, Scott, Brendan, Lisa, Sam, Jack, Dave, Stuart, Nicholas. So, Kev, Pete, Heather, Danny, Ali, Stew, Brett, Philip M. Michelle, Zenos, Sean, Rhino, Philip K, Adam, Elaine, Kyle, and Aaron. That's not Aaron T or Aaron Z, by the way. They're like really talented too. If you want to get in touch with me, you can. You can email verbaldioramail.com you can say hi. You can give me feedback or suggestions. You can also find me@verbaldiorama.com or you can find me on social media @verbaldiorama and you can message me on there. You can also find my stuff@filmstories.co.uk you can check out the magazine, and you can check out online articles. And finally.