On Pixar's 'Turning Red' & Growing Apart
3/13/2022: On Pixar's 'Turning Red', Growing Apart From Parents, TJs Rosemary Croutons, & More ...
I’m sitting on my couch with Morgan and tears stream down my face. I munch on a handful of peanut butter m&ms and curl into the fetal position. On the TV screen, the last 15 minutes of ‘Turning Red’, Pixar’s latest and the first feature film from Domee Shee, plays.
‘Turning Red’ is the tale of thirteen year old, Chinese-Canadian, Meilin Lee (Rosalie Chiang). The story is set in early 2000s Toronto and follows Mei’s messy journey through adolescence and puberty. Mei is the classic “good girl.” When we meet her she’s an exuberant, straight-A student who spends her free time helping her parents run a temple built to honor their Chinese ancestors.
One of the first scenes we get is Mei and her mother (Sandrah Oh) doing their after-school ritual together. They dust, mop, and sweep the temple together joyously – a harmonious mother daughter duo, taking on the world together. Of course, my heart immediately warmed at this image and I thought of my relationship with my mother – partners in crime, one in the same.
But Mei’s “perfect daughter” persona quickly gets disrupted when she wakes up one morning to discover that she has turned into a giant, red panda. Reminiscent of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Mei’s transformation is clearly a metaphor for the onset of puberty – when your body and hormones betray you and you become unrecognizable to yourself and others, seemingly overnight.
We soon find out that Mei’s panda persona represents more than just puberty. In her family, the red-panda effect has plagued all of the women. The panda effect is the result of ancient Chinese magic: whenever the women in her family are triggered by intense emotion – anger, grief, excitement – they turn into a giant red panda. When they calm down and suppress their big feelings, they turn into a human again. This wacky take on the general societal pressure for women to repress their emotions and not appear ‘hysterical’ was incredibly relatable.
At first, Mei is terrified by her panda persona. She is tormented by her giant emotions and afraid of expressing herself for fear of shame and rejection. She wants to suppress herself like her mother does. But when Mei begins to share her big and loud panda self with her middle school friends, they love and accept her. She starts to embrace this different side of herself … and even come to like it.
Throughout the film, I found myself most drawn to the ways in which Mei’s relationship with her mother changed once she discovered her panda self. It felt so foreign to me.
I think that most women can recall first going through puberty and the way it affected their relationship with their mothers. For most it represents a certain breaking point in the relationship – the girl becomes a woman and no longer needs her mother in the same ways. Often, the mother and daughter start to see the world differently and the tense, teenage years follow.
This wasn’t quite the case for me. I remember getting my period for the first time in the seventh grade. My mom picked me up from school and we went to the mall and ate Wetzel's pretzels cinnamon bites and bought earrings at Claire’s and then had a sleepover. I think I didn’t have this classic divergence with my mother while going through puberty because my mom was never a typical ‘mother’/authority figure, so I had nothing to rebel against. We’d always kind of been just like best friends, so “becoming a woman” just strengthened our bond rather than laboring it.
Mei’s mother, on the other hand, is depicted as the stereotypical “tiger mom.” She is overbearing and overprotective and wants Mei to do what she’s done to her own Panda – repress it and stay as the good, docile daughter she knows and loves. Mei has a lot to push back against as she goes through her own journey of teenage self discovery. By watching how her mother has stuffed away her own inner panda, Mei sees what she does not want to do, but Mei’s self-growth necessarily means growing apart from her mom.
In one of the final scenes of the movie, each of the women in Mei’s family – her grandmother, her aunts, and finally her mother, decide once again to give up their inner pandas, and Mei is left alone on the divide to decide if she will follow her mother’s path and the older generations of women, or go her own way and embrace her inner panda.
This was the point of the movie in which I found tears, yet again, uncontrollably streaming down my face. Like most Pixar movies, the film has a way of unexpectedly bringing its audiences deep into the pits of their emotional ruins, but I was surprised by how relatable I found the story by the end. I identified with Mei at the end, not as teenage Becca, but as 25 year old Becca.
As Mei’s mother told her that it was ok for her to go on a different path, I found myself finding a solace that I didn’t know that I still needed. With wide eyes and an animated, kind smile, her mother says “the farther you go, the prouder I’ll be.”
I’d always thought that the time in my life where I’d grow apart from my mother passed. Since I didn’t have that tense relationship as a teen and my mom passed away by the time I was 23, I thought I wouldn’t go through what Mei and most women go through with their moms.
But in the two years since my mom passed away, I have had more growth and self discovery than I had in all of my teenage years. While my mom and I were similar in so many ways, there are things about her that I don’t want to take on. That’s a hard thing to admit once your parent has died. Like so many women of older generations, my mom also repressed many of her bigger and scarier feelings. She was non-confrontational and succumbed to the societal pressures to be a “perfect woman” and contain herself in many ways. I do not want to do that.
Even though I know I want to move away from those tendencies, for me, moving away from those things that my mother embodied means moving away from my mother … because she is gone. In the spaces where other children might feel a distance or a tension, but can ultimately create something new with their parent, I am just left with this giant, gaping void.
At the end of the movie, when Mei and her mother have a new ritual, I couldn’t help but but feel my grief pour out. I will never have something new with my mother. As I grow up and learn and move away from my old self, I am constantly hit with the fact that growing up in some sense means growing away from my mom. She will only ever know me at 23 years old.
So that phrase continues to ring in my ears – “the father you go, the prouder I’ll be.” I know my mom. And I know that is exactly what she’d want – for me to overcome all of the tendencies that she had so much trouble truly escaping from. She’d want me to flourish and to fly, even when it meant flying away from her.
Trader Hoes:
Try these Rosemary Croissant Croutons.
Media Recs:
Check out the books Catalina and the 7 husbands of evelyn hugo.
See yall next week. Happy Daylight Savings :)
Bex
I know part of “growing away” from your mother at this point is scary, as another level of letting her go. She is and always will be in your big, loving heart, Becca. She is always by your side and she sees your growth, even whispering encouragement in your ears.