A short but critical scene in the new film “Turning Red” stopped the daughter of Pixar producer Lindsey Collins right in her tracks in their family’s Oakland home.
“Mom that’s a LOT of pads,” exclaimed one of Collins’ three teen daughters after she caught a glimpse of a scene her mom was reviewing at home — one involving a huge stack of Maxi pads.
The scene in question happens early on in “Turning Red,” Pixar’s 25th film, which lands on Disney+ on March 11. It depicts an overly invested mom Ming (voiced by Sandra Oh) who assumes that what’s set off her 13-year-old daughter’s latest outburst is that she’s experiencing her first period.
The real reason is even more traumatic. It Seems that Mei (voiced by the East Bay actor Rosalie Chiang) is actually cowering in the bathroom after she’s turned into an enormous red panda, a transformation that occurs whenever her emotions get the best of her. It’s a spot-on metaphor for that stage in a girl’s life that can feel like it’s one emotional crisis after another.
Lots of films have been made about puberty, but there’s no denying that seeing Maxi pads in a movie — animated or otherwise — is an uncommon occurrence.
“Turning Red” is bold like that, diving head first into the often uncomfortable topics that populate a girl’s passage into womanhood, and the cultural and familial pressures placed on them all the while.
The film’s also a trailblazer for the Emeryville-based studio, being the first Pixar production helmed entirely by an all-female leadership team. But no one, Shi and Collins said, intended for that to happen. It just did.
Still, the all-female group helped create one of the studio’s most joyously imperfect female characters yet, an exuberant girl who stows a sketchbook of dreamy guys under her bed and has elaborate crushes that she shares with her three close girlfriends. She has a particular thing for a boy band called 4*Town (The film is set in the late 1990s, early 2000s, when such guy groups as Backstreet Boys, ‘N Sync and B2K were at their peak).
Breaking taboos was a goal from the start for “Red” director and co-writer Domee Shi, the 33-year-old filmmaker who was born in Chongqing, China and wowed critics and audiences alike with her appetizing Oscar-winning 2008 short “Bao,” about a Chinese steamed bun that comes to life. (Shi, a self-admitted “foodie,” whips up a delectable cooking sequence in “Red” as well.)
“It just felt that if we wanted to tell an authentic story about a girl coming of age and growing up that we had to include her getting her period or the mom thinking that she got her period when she had turned into a giant red panda,” Shi said.
Much of “Red” seems like it sprung not only from the heart but from personal experience.
“A lot of Mei in the movie was me when I was 13,” Shi admits. “My goal for the movie was to bring audiences into the world of a hormonal tween going through big changes in her life. So we wanted to be as authentic as possible and draw from authentic experiences of being that age. I definitely had a secret sketchbook that to this day my mom still has not discovered, thank God.”
Another sequence lifted from her tween years comes when mother can be seen furtively spying on her daughter at school
“That actually happened to me on — on my first day of middle school — and she wore the sunglasses and everything. Luckily she didn’t get into a fight with the Sikh security guard. It was definitely burned into my memory and I had to put it in the movie.”
Shi said she also wanted to address the ridiculous expectations society places on girls.
“I think there’s a lot of pressure on girls to be perfect, not just with grades but physically. That’s why the panda, I thought, was a perfect metaphor, like an allegory for a girl going through uncomfortable, unsightly changes — like she gets so much bigger, hairer, hungrier, smellier. I think it’s a really empowering story to just see a girl eventually become comfortable and embrace picking up space and being big and furry and loud and scary and hairy when for so long in society we’re told to be small or zip everything up, tighten everything up, pluck everything up.”
It wasn’t always easy to bring up thorny issues, particularly when it came to Mei and Ming’s complicated relationship.
“I knew it was going to be a challenge to depict the conflict between Mei and her mother Ming because of the fear, and rightful concern of her mom going into a stereotype or going into the Tiger mom stereotype. That was always something that we were conscious of and we didn’t want to depict.”
At the same time, some of the most powerful moments in the film spring from that strong, sometimes domineering maternal role. Shi wanted to explore that.
“There are universal truths about immigrant parents and Asian parents, and we didn’t want to ignore that either because that didn’t feel like it was authentic if we just ignored it.”
“It was important for us to depict this relationship with all of the nuance and the respect that it deserves,” Shi added. “One thing that we were able to crack in Ming was that everything she does in the movie comes from a place of love and protection.”
There were other challenges to surmount on the production, namely nailing all the details during a restrictive time in the pandemic. Since traveling to Canada was not an option then, production designer Rona Liu went to work to accurately depict the Toronto temple in the film by visiting the Bok Kai Temple in Marysville along with temples in San Francisco.
Shi sought input from others within the community since even though she and Liu’s backgrounds are Asian, they wanted to make certain “to get a perspective from every angle when we are depicting these details about this specific culture and this neighborhood.”
While COVID-19 forced the “whole review process” to move online, the Pixar and Disney team did manage to host a freezing outdoor wrap party in fall 2021 at the Concord Pavilion.
Rosalee Chiang, who voices Mei, was there and says it was one magical experience. She started working on “Red” when she was 12 and is now 16, “I was literally coming of age during the entire recording of the movie,” she said.
It was during that wrap-up party when Collins felt just how significant it was to be part of an all-women leadership team.
“We have this tradition to have the filmmakers go up on stage to thank everyone,” she recalls. “It was the five of us and all five of us were women standing up on that stage. I think intellectually I always knew, but emotionally you really felt it up there.”
Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.
‘RED’
Rated: PG
Voice cast: Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Ava Morse, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Hyein Park, Orion Lee, Wai Ching Ho, James Hong
Director: Domee Shi
Running time: 1 hour, 47 minutes
When & where: Opens March 11 on Disney+, limited engagement at Grand Lake Theater, Oakland, March 11-17
Source: www.mercurynews.com