Turning Red

• Main
• Wikipedia
• All Subpages
• Create New

This page needs visual enhancement. You can help All The Tropes by finding a high-quality image or video to illustrate the topic of this page.

Turning Red is a 2022 American computer-animated fantasy comedy film produced by Pixar, written and directed by Domee Shi (in her feature directorial debut), and starring the voices of Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh, Ava Morse, Hyein Park, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Orion Lee, Wai Ching Ho, Tristan Allerick Chen, and James Hong. Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell contributed with the soundtrack. It was premiered on Disney+.

Meilin "Mei" Lee (Chiang) is a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl living in Toronto in 2002. On one side, she is the dutiful daughter of Ming Lee (Oh), taking care of the family temple and trying to be the perfect daughter. On the other side, she is an Extroverted Nerd who loves hanging out with her friends Miriam (Morse), Priya (Ramakrishnan), and Abby (Park) and fangirling over popular Boy Band 4*Town. Despite the increasing conflict between these two sides of her teenage identity, Mei thinks she can deal with this pretty well...

That's it, until one morning she awakes transformed into a gigantic red panda.

Turns out that this is an ancient blessing, inherited by all women in her family, that lets them transform into gigantic red pandas, a transformation that is triggered by harnessing emotion. Now Mei has to learn how to control this power, and also discover who she really is and who she wants to be.

Not to be confused with the trope Turns Red.

Tropes used in Turning Red include:

• Abusive Mom:
  • Ming means well, but she's got obvious anger issues, as shown when she kicks the Sikh security guard in the leg for politely telling her she can't spy on her daughter in school after she mistakenly thinks Mei got her period. Most of that anger translates to cutting down any hint that Mei has normal teen interests, from drawing to wanting to attend the 4*Town concert when Mei asks politely with a presentation. The climax has her become physically abusive as well when chasing down Mei in her kaiju panda form, manhadling her daughter and screaming how she was never allowed to go to concerts. The Time Skip shows that Mei is setting clear boundaries with her, and Ming is finally shedding these tendencies.
  • Wei was also this to Ming, emotionally. Even a phone call from her sends Ming into a Troubled Fetal Position as she begs her husband not to pick up the receiver. We soon see why: Wei is cutting, judgmental, and stern. They both pay for it in the climax when Wei, Ming's sisters and cousins berate Ming for Mei running away from the ceremony, something that wasn't Ming's fault, and causing her to become a Kaiju Red Panda who proceeds to rampage in downtown Toronto.
• The Ace: Meilin, as she is the best student in her school. However, the pressure is slowly getting to her.
• An Aesop:
  • You become the full person who you want to be by embracing every part of you, even the parts that you don't like.
  • Bottling your feelings is never a good idea because they will explode at the worst moment.
  • One for the parents: whatever parenting choices your parent made shouldn't inform the way you raise your own kid nor the kid's own future.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees
  • Many viewers felt that Ming's antics were over-exaggerated and cartoonish, but many people of Asian descent have stated that their parents were exactly like that. Director Domee Shi even said that the scene where Ming stalks Mei to the school was based on personal experience.
• Amazingly Embarrassing Parents: Ming, when she isn't inadvertently cutting down Mei for wanting to be.
• Animesque: while the visual style is mostly Pixar, there are several instances of exaggerated emotion rendered in anime style. Mei's drawings are in an animesque style.
• Blessed with Suck: To Sun Yee, the ancestor who receive the power of transforming into a giant panda, it was a blessing, as it let her protect her daughters and her town from bandits and enemy armies. But after several centuries and with times of increasing peace and urbanism, this power has become highly dangerous and inconvenient, so most women have opted to seal it at the first chance they get rather than living with it.
• Boy Band: 4*Town, which is a pastiche of several boy band concepts of the Turn of the Millennium (yes, even the Korean member–he is supposed to be a shout-out to the Second-Gen era of K-pop idol groups)
• Cuteness Proximity: Abby is affected by Mei's red panda form in this way. The girls decide to exploit it after noticing that the rest of the school reacts the same way.
• Education Mama: Ming, who learned it from her own mother.
• Extroverted Nerd: Mei.
• Generational Trauma: This is the central conflict of the film. Mei has spent her whole life pleasing her mother Ming but her mind and body start to rebel after Ming humiliates her in front of her crush Devon after accusing him of being a sexual predator. Ming in the meantime remains oblivious to the fact that she's emotionally abusing her only daughter while thinking she's helping out and shaming her for the crime of being a teenager... because Ming's own mother did the same to her. It's implied this emotional abuse and shaming runs several generations back. Her mother didn't even approve of Jin, Ming's Nice Guy of a husband, and is quick to berate Ming if Mei appears less than perfect. The climax features Ming's mother seeing the consequences of her abuse when Ming's panda talisman cracks and she becomes a kaiju-red panda, endangering an entire crowd at the 4*Town concert where Mei ran to reconcile with her friends and manhandling her daughter painfully.
• Informed Attractiveness: Devon, the convenience store clerk Mei and all her friends have a crush in, isn't ugly at all but he evidently doesn't seem to deserve the amount of female attention he receives. In fact, this is an in-universe point: when Mei, who initially didn't see him as attractive, questions her friends about it, Abby answers that he may not be as hot as the 4*Town boys, but he is actually available here, unlike the unattainable world-class hottie idols.
• My Beloved Smother: Ming. A good part of the film conflict is that Ming cannot turns it off, seeing Mei as mostly an extension of herself, and humiliating the poor girl with well-meaning but misguided instances of helicopter parenting.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Wei and the aunties have this reaction when they realize that they inadvertently sicced a fugue-state Ming in kaiju panda form on Mei, when the latter runs away from the sealing ceremony and the family blames Ming for this rebellion. As they reunite with Mei, who is trying to dodge her mother's blows, Wei looks guilty as her daughter is attacking her granddaughter. This motivates her decision to break her talisman and help move an unconscious Ming to the sealing circle.
• Nice Girl: All of Mei's friends are this. Demonstrated when, after their Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure, Miriam still cared for Mei's Tamagotchi.
• No Periods, Period: Falls under exceptions because the story is, at its base, a big puberty metaphor. There is a scene where a just transformed Mei hides in the bathroom and her mom interpreted her elusive excuses as the girl finally achieved menarche and reacted by bringing out an impressive mountain of sanitary napkins and other products intended to relieve menstrual pain.
• Reality Ensues: In the climax, Ming disrupts the 4*Town concert while having an episode in giant panda form, destroying the stadium before the concertgoers, stage crew, and performers can safely evacuate. There isn't much left after Mei successfully knocks her mother out with a headbutt. After the Time Skip, it's shown that the city ordered Ming and the family to pay for damages to rebuild the giant stadium, and they're using Mei's panda form to raise the money. Given that the transformation is an Open Secret, Toronto wouldn't let Ming off the hook for endangering innocent people and destroying one of their sources of revenue.
• Shown Their Work: There really was a lunar eclipse on May 26, 2002, the date of the film's climax.
• "Well Done, Daughter" Girl: Mei, at least at the beginning. It's revealed that she is merely the latest on a legacy full of this, with her mom Ming being exactly the same towards her own mother.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Priya reads a lot of YA novels, currently a werewolf romance. After she gets over the initial shock of seeing Mei's panda form, Priya asks if Mei is a werewolf. It's an entirely reasonable guess, but Mei corrects her.