So... Turning Red is... fine.
The animation is lovely. The big furry red panda is sufficiently floofy, and I did get distracted more than once by close up shots of knitted textures. Because it just looks fucking amazing. As do pretty much all modern Pixar and Disney movies.
And I also need to say that I didn't hate the movie. It didn't infuriate me to the point of apoplexy like, for example, Soul. This won't be a long giant rant. The movie was, overall, fine.
It just isn't for me.
Which is perfectly valid.
I'm also not sure who the intended audience of this movie is. Yes, yes, yes... clearly the intended audience is 11-14 year old girls.
But to me, this movie feels focused in a way no other Pixar movie has been so narrowly focused. At it's core, I would suggest that this movie is actually for the 13 year old versions of the women who wrote and directed it. Because this movie is the most on-the-nose metaphor for teenage girls and puberty I've ever seen.
I hope it works for the people it's being aimed at. I hope the movie works for people in general. I'm just not one of those people.
It's good to see Pixar not just doing the same old same old... in a world of Disney remakes, sequels nobody wants or asked for, weaponised nostalgia and the like, it's good to see them taking a chance on a different kind of movie, giving different kinds of storytellers the opportunity to flex and tell their stories.
But the downside of that is movies that may not be universal and speak to everyone. I mean, maybe you get lucky and they are that thing. But sometimes you won't. And that's okay too.
My main issue with this movie is that I didn't actually LIKE any of the characters. Except maybe Priya. Because Priya has no fucks to give, and will also very definitely grow up to become a lesbian. But I disliked the main character quite a bit. Which is bad... because she's your main character.
I literally spent the first... twenty minutes of this movie staring at it with a raised eyebrow because the overwhelming emotion being inspired the movie was "WTF is happening and who the fuck are these people". And I realised that I needed to consciously lower my eyebrow before my face seized up.
Storywise it feels like it's pretty well worn territory, and it's a storyline that, personally, infuriates the living fuck out of me. Not because it's a bad storyline, but because it's at the same time both a well worn trope that I'm kind of sick of, but also a shitty real-life scenario that I don't really want to see in my media because it makes me mad.
And that's "immigrant family puts overly harsh expectations on child from that family and cause stress to the child as a result", combined with "if you people just had a real conversation we wouldn't be here". And with a little "repressing young women's sexuality" thrown in as a garnish.
Again, not BAD. Fairly realistic, relatively speaking, it's definitely an experience that people have had, but also not something I'm interested in watching. Because I just want to slap the people involved. Maybe it's also because it's a trope that gets trotted out in a lot of gay media as well... replacing "immigrant" with "straight". So, it's, as the kids say, somewhat triggering. But in a way that just turns me off and distances me from the story.
Also, for me, there's a bunch of ideas here that only get partially explored. I suspect some of that is probably because parts of the story are based on the real life experiences of the women who wrote and directed it, and that's their lived experience. But parts of this story seem... superfluous. Or not well explored. In a way that I'm not used to seeing from a Pixar movie.
Generally if something is in a Pixar movie, it's there for a clear reason. It has definitive set up and pay off. This movie has that... but things don't get set up and paid off in ways that work for me. Like I said before though, that's potentially the cost of telling different types of stories.
But at the end of the day, I recognise that this movie isn't aimed at me, it's not a story that I have an affinity with and, therefore, it's not FOR me. And that's fine. A movie designed for 13 year old girls doesn't actually need to appeal to a man in his late 40's.
yani's rating: 2 boy bands out of 5
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