In its 27 years of releases, Pixar has put out films built on some pretty outlandish premises: talking toys, a rat moonlighting as a chef, a balloon-buoyed house. But “Turning Red,” the animation studio’s 25th feature film, bravely ventures where no Disney-owned property has gone before: puberty.
“Turning Red,” streaming on Disney+ beginning March 11, follows Meilin “Mei” Lee, a 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl in a mess of middles: She is caught between pleasing her hypervigilant mom, Ming (voiced by Sandra Oh) and exploring her own adolescent identity. She is caught between the pop culture of Canada (namely, her undying obsession with the NSYNC-esque boy band, 4*Town) and her pride in her Chinese cultural upbringing.
And, oh yeah, whenever her emotions start to get out of control (which, when you’re 13, is basically every other hour), Mei turns — poof — into a giant red panda. Her panda outbursts turn out to be the result of a longstanding family curse that traps her between beauty and beast.
The metaphor is hard to miss, and the film makes full use of its PG rating — after Mei’s first transformation, there is a laugh-out-loud intergenerational misunderstanding. (”Did the red peony bloom?” her mom asks as Mei, in panda form, cowers behind a shower curtain.)
“We wanted to make a cuter version of ‘The Incredible Hulk,’” said director and co-writer Domee Shi in a Zoom interview with the Globe. “It’s hairy and awkward and red — red like menstruation, red like the color you turn when you’re angry, or embarrassed, or crushing after a boy or girl in school. It was definitely the color I felt like I was most of the time when I was a tween. It just felt like the natural form that Mei’s puberty took.”
Though the use of the word “sexy” or the sight of menstrual pads in a Pixar film might be unthinkable for some, Shi never wavered. “It’s about time,” she said. “I wanted with this movie just to give it to that 13-year-old me, who was searching for media like this, was searching for movies and stories that could help explain what was going on with her body and her emotions.”
Content isn’t the only aspect of the movie that breaks barriers — “Turning Red” is the first Pixar feature solely directed by a woman. Shi, 34, started at Pixar in 2011 as a storyboarding intern, later contributing to titles like “Inside Out” and “Toy Story 4.″ She made waves in 2018 with her Oscar-winning Pixar short, “Bao,” which also charted the tension between mother and child. The difference with “Turning Red,” Shi’s first feature, is that it attempts to “analyze that relationship from the child’s point of view,” she said.
“That mother-child relationship, that’s one of the first real relationships that you form, and it’s so important and it shapes the rest of your life,” said Shi. “I barely scratched the surface of that relationship with ‘Bao.’”
In “Turning Red,” that relationship goes beyond the surface changes of puberty — it explores the ever-changing fabric of the mother-daughter dynamic. In the male-dominated world of Pixar (both in the characters depicted and the filmmakers giving them life), “Turning Red” stands out by celebrating the female gaze in all of its cringey glory. Suddenly, Mei is lusting after boys, something her mom is none too happy about. Suddenly, Mei cares more about getting tickets to see her favorite band with her three best friends than she does about getting good grades or helping her mom in their family’s ancestral temple.
Suddenly, perhaps, Mei cares more about letting her giant red panda free than keeping it bottled inside for the sake of her parents. “The panda became this metaphor for puberty,” Shi said, “but also a metaphor for intergenerational trauma and how each generation deals with this messy side of themselves.”
The film, said co-screenwriter Julia Cho during an online press conference, turns a microscope on the daunting “transition from going from a girl whose mom is your whole world to a young woman who’s trying to learn to be independent.”
“We would joke that we went through that in our 20s,” Cho added with a laugh. “Here’s precocious Mei doing it at 13. It took me much longer.”
Shi isn’t shy about the semi-autobiographical nature of the movie. Like Mei, she is Chinese-Canadian and enjoys a close relationship with her mom. Even Shi’s childhood love of anime inspired the “chunky cute” and “Asian tween fever dream” aesthetic of the film. “It’s so on board with trying this East-meets-West, anime-Pixar-hybrid style to tell this story,” Shi said during that press conference.
It’s possible that the subject matter marks a broader evolution, one where puberty has gone from something confined to American Girl books to something publicly commiserated about on social media. “Turning Red” sure seems to think so — when Mei tearfully confides in her friends about her panda problem, they respond with compassion and acceptance.
“I think we are living in this cultural shift where [puberty] has gone from being something to be embarrassed and ashamed of, to being really embraced,” Cho said. “This whole new generation, for them, it just is normal.”
This shift finds no better example than in Rosalie Chiang, the voice of Mei, who said the puberty plot often hit close to home (she started work on the movie when she was 12). “It’s such a messy and weird and awkward time that I literally went through during the duration of recording for Pixar,” said Chiang, 16, during the press conference. “I hope people admire what [Mei] goes through and how she deals with it.”
Despite the growing cultural acceptance, the material is still bawdy by Disney and Pixar standards. And yet, Shi said, the company didn’t bristle at the plot (evidenced by the film’s $175 million budget, according to The New York Times). If the initial critical response is any indication, it doesn’t seem like audiences are balking at the film’s depiction of the panda-monium of puberty, either.
“Why was it ever not normal?” Shi said about the focus on puberty. “It didn’t feel like a big deal. It was funny, and it felt real.”
Dana Gerber can be reached at dana.gerber@globe.com. Follow her @danagerber6.