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Domee Shi and Julia Cho pen Pixar’s most quirky and personal film.
By Danny Munso
Spoiler Warning: This excerpt discusses plot points from the entire film, so proceed with caution
There are more than a few similarities between director Domee Shi and Meilin Lee, the protagonist of her feature debut, Turning Red. Like Shi, Mei is a Chinese-Canadian girl from Toronto who draws in secret sketchbooks, loves boy bands and has a close relationship with her mother. Unlike Shi, Mei begins transforming into a giant red panda when she gets emotional thanks to an ancient family “inconvenience.” After winning an Oscar for her Pixar short Bao in 2018, Shi was asked to pitch three feature ideas, and Turning Red’s singular story was what caught the attention of the studio’s brain trust. “I would have been excited if any of the three ideas were picked, but this one was the most personal and I guess the weirdest,” Shi laughs. “Mei and her mother were pretty solidly developed and realized from that initial pitch. I could just see them in my head because I was inspired by own relationship with my mom.” Pixar certainly choose wisely because, thanks to a story that contains surprising, emotional turns and Shi’s heightened, stylized filmmaking techniques, Turning Red is one of the most original films in the studio’s entire catalog.
Shi’s core idea — a mother-daughter relationship and the fact that Mei’s transformation into a panda is a thinly veiled metaphor for a teenage girl going through puberty — was there from the start. She developed the story further with writer Sarah Streicher, who receives story credit on the final film but had to leave the project early on due to another commitment. In the search for a new co-writer, Shi and producer Lindsey Collins didn’t have to look far. Shi had bonded with playwright and TV writer Julia Cho, who had been working on a different Pixar project before Shi asked her to join Turning Red. “It was just synchronicity,” Cho says. “She already knew and liked me, so it felt like it could be an easier beginning.” But as soon as Cho was on board, the pressure kicked in, as the next draft they would write would determine whether or not the film got the greenlight. “We needed a draft that would get the full approval to start hiring story artists and doing reels and the whole process. It was a pretty big first mountain to climb. Luckily, the first draft was great, the voices were great, Mei was there, [and] her mom was there. It was just, I think, really exploring and finding the right sort of vehicle to carry these characters.”
Turning Red follows Mei (voiced by Rosalie Chiang), a confident 13-year-old who is extremely close with her mother, Ming (Sandra Oh) and a fiercely loyal group of friends, including Miriam (Ava Morse), Priya (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan) and Abby (Pixar story artist Hyein Park). One morning, Mei wakes up to find she has begun morphing into a giant red panda whenever she gets overly emotional, a trait that runs in the women in her family. The red panda spirit can be trapped in a talisman but only through a ritual done on the night of the Red Moon, which is over a month away and happens to coincide with a long-awaited concert by 4*Town, the boy band with which Mei and her friends are obsessed. That is the story that made it to fruition, but it’s certainly not the one Shi and Cho started with. For a while the plot was completely different, focused on Mei and Ming’s relationship with one of her sisters and a cousin of Mei around the same age named Leo. “’It was more of a generational story,” Cho says. “The mom had this sister that she had a rivalry with, and she had a son Mei had a rivalry with. We loved Leo. He was conceived as this snotty cousin Mei can’t bear.”
While the writers liked that version of the story, they felt like they were losing the thematic elements Shi initially intended. “It was interesting, but I kept thinking back to my initial pitch about a girl going through magical puberty, and I [soon] realized we should focus on that,” Shi says. “By including this cousin and aunt and making this bigger story about this family feud, we were losing that metaphor a little bit.” Cho credits Pixar creative chief and Soul director Pete Docter in particular for being a big proponent of focusing the film more on Mei and Ming. “I think that’s what’s tricky about the Pixar process,” Cho says. “You’re not getting rid of things because you don’t like them. Often the scenes are great, the characters are great, and I think a lesser studio would say, ‘Hey this works, don’t break it.’ What [Pixar does] over and over again is say, ‘This works, but could it be better?’ I think the relentless pursuit of something that is better is what gets them to the movies we see in the end.”
One of the many ways Turning Red upends clichés in its storyline is in the reaction to Mei’s transformation. Her friends and classmates do not shun her; rather, they completely accept her, mirroring the relationship Shi had with her friends as she was growing up in Toronto. “There’s been a lot of coming-of-age teen transformation movies in the past, so the challenge was to surprise audiences and subvert their expectations,” Shi says. “For me it made sense that her friends would unconditionally love her because that’s the experience I had growing up. All the times I felt really shitty about myself and my body and my self-worth, it was always my friends who would be there to validate me and be my cheerleaders and prop me up. So that felt true to life.” Forgoing false drama with the friends allows the film to focus its tension on the main relationship in the film. “The story was never going to be about Mei getting acceptance from her classmates. It was always going to be about her and her mom, so we didn’t need to hide her identity from her classmates or be shunned at school. It didn’t feel necessary for her to be hiding it at school. It also helped with that idea of Mei developing this double identity as she comes of age, as we all do. When we start to become a little more rebellious, we start to compartmentalize our lives at school and at home. We’re a little more ourselves at school and with our friends, and then at home we kind of leave all that messiness behind and button ourselves up for our family. So it made more sense that she would be hiding from her mom rather than her classmates at school.”
Mei and Ming’s relationship, while full of love, is a complicated one. Shi admits that a constant comment the team received after each screening was that Ming was a little too unlikable. “We kept getting that note over and over, but I didn’t want to water her down either because that edge is what I liked about her,” she laughs before quoting one of her favorite moments in which Ming dresses down a local convenience store worker that Mei has a crush on, telling the unsuspecting boy that “this is what happens when you don’t wear sunblock and do drugs all day.” Cho notes it was hard to calibrate Ming’s depiction because the women on whom she was based were the creators’ own strong-willed mothers. “The funny thing was I felt Domee and I and other Asian American story artists — we all kept wanting her to go further. We realized our appetite for extreme behavior was so far beyond because many of our mothers were pretty formidable people. Our standard, our threshold was so much higher, so we had to dial it back. But it all has to be rooted in love. If it’s rooted in love, there’s a lot of empathy and it makes her more grounded. I will say also that I’m a mom and I definitely did feel protective that Ming should feel like a mom and that her behavior shouldn’t go beyond what I could imagine myself doing one day.”
Shi points to a seemingly innocuous scene as an example of how they slightly adjusted the Ming character as the filmmaking process went on. Early on, Mei gives her parents a presentation on why she should be allowed to spend $200 on a ticket to the upcoming 4*Town concert. In the finished film, Ming reacts negatively but it’s more shock and disbelief than anger. “In the first version we wrote that we almost fully animated, Ming was a little more arch in her performance,” Shi says. “She was mad at Mei and saying, ‘How dare she say that to her mother?’ We got feedback saying she was too sharp, so Julia and I went back in and tried to lean into her character from a practical standpoint. She wouldn’t understand why anyone would pay $200 to see these boys. That gave us a chance to give a glimpse into what she thinks would be worthy of that.” The final scene has Ming incredulously venting to her husband about the boy band: “Who do they think they are? Celine Dion?!” That turned the scene into more of a comedic moment yet conveyed the character’s emotions without being over the top. “Sandra puts that weird accent on that name, and the animator added this really funny finger waggle as she says it. It made that scene funnier and made her more likable even though on paper she was technically doing the same thing as the last version. All those little elements we tweaked made her character more appealing while still maintaining that edge.”
Some of Turning Red’s best scenes are when the characters leave Toronto behind and enter a magical astral plane depicted as a bamboo forest. It’s in this mystical realm Mei meets her ancestor Sun Yee, who started the family’s panda curse and chooses whether or not to leave the panda part of her behind as the previous members of her family decided to. “There was always some version of this from the very first draft of the script,” Shi says. “It felt like we needed to honor the magical aspect of the movie. It was an opportunity to go to a magical space because we spend the entire movie in reality in Toronto. It’s very grounded, so I wanted one moment where we are in a not real place for Mei to meet her ancestor.” The climactic moment of the film is a confrontation between Mei and Ming’s panda forms after Ming’s accidentally gets unleashed during Mei’s failed ritual. The two pandas come face to face at — of course — the 4*Town concert at Toronto’s SkyDome. Very late in the story process, Shi and the creative team determined the final heart-to-heart between Mei and Ming should take place in this astral realm, not in the real world as it was always intended. “I wanted to take them out of the SkyDome and give Mei and her mom this quiet, surreal, magical space to say their peace to each other without all the spectators and 4*Town and get away from all that. We had an older version where they had their talk in a destroyed SkyDome, but then everyone else is just kind of awkwardly watching them and not really saying anything. It didn’t feel right.”
This moment grew along with the idea behind the realm. As the story process evolved, it became clear to the writers that if Mei was going to have a choice of whether to remain a panda, that had to happen somewhere. So this bamboo forest astral plane was born along with an ancient ritual that must be performed in conjunction with the Red Moon. “Once we dove into what the ritual does, we realized the ritual creates this alternate space,” Cho says. “The ritual is where we first see that space, and once we discovered it, it seemed very clear and organic that’s where they go at the end of the movie. It felt like that’s where this conversation, this truth telling, can finally happen. It just came through a process of discovery. As often happens with a film’s structure, something that happens in the beginning often tells you what happens at the end.” The conversation takes place between Mei and the teenage version of Ming and is punctuated with one of the more beautiful sequences in a Pixar film: Mei quietly leading her mother back to the realm’s portal, where she will leave her panda form behind. The two silently walk, and Ming begins to age into the adult we see in the film. Cho gives credit to that sequence’s story artist — Madeline Sharafian, director of Pixar’s Oscar-nominated short Burrow and co-story lead on Turning Red — for giving the moment the visual weight it needed. “I remember her boards and how she drew the progression of her aging as you glimpse her through the bamboo. She is one of the many brilliant storyboard artists who took what was in the script and made it visual poetry.”
All the plotlines of Turning Red converge in the film’s climactic moment to make up a glorious amalgam of elements that shouldn’t work together but somehow do seamlessly. One rule of the panda ritual is you must sing a song to get it to work. For Mei’s first crack, her family does an ancient Chinese chant, with the final one they perform — to transform Ming back from her panda form — happening in the SkyDome. And when that chant doesn’t seem to be working, Mei’s friends track down 4*Town to have the group perform their hit song “Nobody Like U” to trigger the ritual. Shi laughs when that sequence is recalled. “Oh my gosh, I still can’t believe we pulled that off,” she says. “On paper it sounded insane. Mei’s family starts to chant, and then there’s beatboxing, and then 4*Town comes in. And it’s supposed to be emotional and dramatic and weird and powerful. The idea came late in the game, and it basically needed to feel like all the elements important to Mei that she was compartmentalizing and keeping separate — all of that could help her in that moment. This whole time she’s been struggling with who she should honor, and this moment proves all of that can come together in a really beautiful way to help her and her mom.”
Through all the various iterations of the story, Mei’s fate was consistent: In the end, she would choose not to sever her ties with the panda. “She was always going to stay a panda,” Shi says definitively. “It felt that if this is a story about change and puberty, you can’t go back from puberty. You have to keep going forward.” Cho recalls there being little discussion about whether or not she would keep the panda and more about how they would execute that as the ending: “I think what was pretty clear from the beginning is neither Domee nor I were interested in a happy, happy ending. I think there was always a sense that it shouldn’t be a 100 percent win. Ideally, the ending would feel truthful and complicated, the way life is. So it was about what does keeping [the panda] mean for her and what does that look like? It was nice knowing that ending was always our destination.”
Though Turning Red is Shi’s first feature, it certainly will not be her last. With this film, she officially makes history as the extremely long overdue first female solo director of a Pixar film (2012’s Brave was co-directed by animation legend Brenda Chapman), and Cho wants it known that no matter how many risks they took with the story, everything felt safe with Shi at the helm. “She is so decisive and has a really good compass she’s tapped into,” the co-writer says. “She was really in touch with that for this movie, so even though we would make big moves, I always had faith we were making the right move. You have to be fearless as a storyteller, and Domee is fearless.”
Turning Red is streaming on Disney+ now
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