Turning Red
People have all kinds of sides to them Mei, and some sides are messy. The point isn’t to push the bad stuff away; it’s to make room for it, live with it.
I’m not intentionally going for a color theme here, but my follow-up for last week’s The Color Purple just so happens to be Turning Red. I decided I was going to cover Turning Red for Women’s History Month when I watched it for the first time in January. I immediately picked up on the themes of girlhood, female friendships, and the complicated mother-daughter relationship between Mei and Ming. I appreciated the way it delved into Chinese culture, which further connected the women in Mei’s family.
On the surface, it is a fun animated film about a red panda, an adorable animal found in southwest China, but where it was much more convenient for me to find at The Central Park Zoo. Though underneath that, it is so much more. In a world today where Tween girls have fallen down the skincare rabbit hole, Turning Red, which is set in 2002, is a reminder of what it was like to be a 13-year-old girl long before social media and unlimited internet access.
Mei’s Emotions
The raging emotions of a 13-year-old girl are at the center of Turning Red. While this was once shameful and often made fun of, Taylor Swift has built a billion-dollar empire by singing about her feelings, and stars like Olivia Rodrigo have followed suit. The shame around being emotional, especially as a Tween, is not as strong as it used to be, and Turning Red further pushes us as a society to be more accepting of our feelings.
Mei is used to bottling up her feelings in her home environment with her very overbearing mother, who doesn’t seem in tune with her own feelings. However, one of the main themes of the film is that Mei is an eighth grader now, with raging hormones and emotions she doesn’t know how to control. Everything goes completely out of balance when she starts drawing pictures of Devon from the Daisy Mart. Mei finally allows the feelings she has for boys to be free, but when her mother Ming finds her drawings and storms to the Daisy Mart to accuse Devon of dating her underage daughter, Mei’s emotions go wild.
She experiences extreme embarrassment as well as shame and guilt. As an obvious people pleaser, Mei feels like she’s let her mother down by allowing her feelings for Devon to take over. When she falls asleep, she transitions into a giant red panda and, the next morning is terrified of what she has become. However, Mei soon learns emotional regulation. Some adults don’t even know how to regulate their nervous systems, but at just 13, Mei has learned a crucial tool that will help her for the rest of her life.
Unfortunately, there are multiple obstacles, such as 4 Town, a boy named Carter at school whom Mei thinks is cute, a boy named Tyler at school whom Mei despises, and her overbearing mother who can’t stop herself from embarrassing Mei in public. However, Mei continues to practice emotional regulation, and by the end of the film, after embracing her inner red panda, she can effortlessly switch between panda and human and no longer lets her emotions get the best of her.
Girlhood & Friendship In Turning Red
"Girlhood" was a hot topic in 2023 thanks to Taylor Swift, the Barbie Movie, and The Summer I Turned Pretty. I even analyzed it in my summer newsletter for Now and Then. In Turning Red, Mei is 13, an age where she's drifting away from her parents and finding solace, community, and understanding in her three best friends, Priya, Miriam, and Helen. The core four are obsessed with the boy band 4 Town in the way real tweens were obsessed with groups like NSYNC and One Direction. To this day, older generations struggle to understand tweens' obsession with pop stars and other public figures, but for Mei and her friends, it's a way for them to feel understood in a way they aren't by their parents.
The music industry historically likes to give young girls songs from boybands or young male popstars that make them feel as though they are being sung to by the men they look up to and find attractive. This is evident in songs like One Direction's "What Makes You Beautiful" or Jesse McCartney's "Beautiful Soul." It's a genius marketing tactic because no matter how many times it's done, it always works. Even in a fictional animated film, it works for Mei and her friends as they sing along to 4 Town songs like "Nobody Like U" and "1 True Love." As ridiculous as it may sound reading this as an adult, this was once a crucial part of being a Tween.
“This isn’t just our first concert; this is our first step into womanhood, and we have to do it together”-Mei, Turning Red.
Because Mei feels misunderstood by her parents, specifically her mother, she leans on her friends for everything. This is why it doesn't take long for her to reveal her red panda state to her friends despite trying to keep it a secret. What I like most about Mei's friends is that they have a pretty easy time accepting that their best friend has turned into a giant panda. I like that there aren't really many fights between the friends at all throughout the film. While there's a moment toward the end where they're upset with Mei because she lets them down, they're always quick to forgive her.
I think it is so important to have strong friendships in life, and if you're surrounding yourself with people who are constantly picking fights or getting mad at you, you need to find a new group of friends. I've always been good at letting things go and not holding any resentment toward my friends. It especially helps if you don't take things personally. There have been too many stereotypes about girls being catty and too many misconceptions about groups of girls always fighting with each other. I'm glad Turning Red gave Mei a good group of supportive and encouraging friends who accept her, her flaws, and her inner red panda.
In fact, Mei's friends are the ones who calm her down when her emotions are all out of whack. When she feels intense emotions coming on, which could cause her to transform into her red panda, she closes her eyes and imagines her friends all around her, hugging her and supporting her. She's then able to reach a place of serenity, and any chance of turning into a red panada evaporates. However, Mei's friends are also in full support of her using her red panda for popularity so she can sell merch and make money for them to buy 4 Town tickets.
They're not jealous, and they don't feel like they're losing their friend to popularity. They fully embrace it and even encourage Mei to stay a red panda, forgoing her family's ritual to remove the panda from her because they've noticed how confident she's become. I've seen so many shows and movies where a character's friends immediately become jealous and turn on them when they start thriving (have you seen The Devil Wears Prada?!?) But Turning Red is different. Mei's friends love her the best when she feels the best about herself, and that is true friendship.
Mei & Ming’s Relationship
One of the most present themes in Turning Red is the complex relationship between Mei and her mother, Ming. Mei loves her mother, but there is some extreme toxicity in their dynamic. Mei constantly tries to please her mother and hides who she truly is from her because she doesn’t believe her mother could ever accept her. Ming basically puts down anything that Mei loves, like 4 Town, her “delinquent” friends, and even the inner red panda.
Though the fact that Ming knew Mei was bound to turn into a red panda, but forwent telling her takes the cake as her most toxic trait. Had Ming educated her daughter, she wouldn’t have been so terrified and ashamed when it happened. Ming is also incredibly overbearing, showing up at school to spy on her daughter to make sure she’s not turning into a red panda in front of everyone and refusing to allow her to go to the 4 Town concert, which she ultimately goes to anyway.
“Don’t hold back for anyone. The farther you go, the prouder I’ll be”-Ming, Turning Red.
However, the dynamic shifts when we learn about Ming’s own relationship with her mother. She and her mother had a falling out when she married Mei’s father, Jin, because her mother didn’t approve of him. We see Ming’s own red panda come out toward the end of the film, and it’s even bigger than Mei’s because Ming is full of suppressed rage that she never felt comfortable expressing.
Mei meets the 13-year-old version of her mother when she enters another realm, which feels like just a state of mind, similar to where people go during meditation. Here, Mei comforts her mother as she expresses her sadness over never feeling good enough for her own mother. Turning Red helps us empathize with Ming when we realize that parents are just passing down to their kids what was done to them by their own parents.
This scene between Mei and Ming feels like an inner child healing or a letting go of generational trauma. It is typically the youngest generation that heals their lineage, and because Mei does this, she helps free her mother and repair her relationship with Ming and Ming’s relationship with her own mother.
Self Acceptance
Intertwined with the storyline of Mei and her mother's relationship is a message of self-acceptance. Mei cannot accept herself because she's too busy pleasing her mother, and she feels she needs her mother's validation above all else. However, a beautiful moment in Turning Red comes when Mei's father, Jin, finds a video camera with footage of Mei and her friends. The videos showcase Mei's fun side, which she never feels comfortable expressing in her mother's presence. While Ming would have scolded Mei for dancing with her friends to 4 Town, Jin found the footage endearing.
“We’ve all got an inner beast. We’ve all got a messy, loud, weird part of ourselves hidden away, and a lot of us never let it out, but I did, how about you?”-Mei, Turning Red.
Jin encourages Mei to let that side of her out more often instead of hiding it in fear of what her mother would think. Mei's father helps her accept herself, and as a result, she decides not to follow through with removing her red panda during a red moon ritual. Unlike the women in her lineage who came before her, Mei doesn't see her red panda side as shameful. She accepts it as a part of herself that her ancestors gave to her as a gift. Her bravery and self-acceptance help free her mother as well from the cage she built around herself due to her own mother's disapproval.
Culture
I was incredibly fascinated by the use of culture in Turning Red and thought the entire premise of using a red panda family curse to convey a message of self-acceptance, family healing, and tween girlhood was genius. From the start, we learn that Ming is incredibly proud of her heritage as she owns a family temple and invites visitors in to teach them about her culture. The temple is specifically dedicated to Ming's maternal ancestor, Sun Yee, who is crucial to the story.
You too will banish the beast within and finally become your true self. May Sun Yee guide you and keep you safe,”-Mei’s grandmother, Turning Red.
We later learn Sun Yee is the one who created the red panda curse. What I found fascinating is that, as I mentioned earlier, the story feels connected to generational trauma. During a war, when the men were away fighting, Sun Yee sought a way for her and her daughters to protect themselves. During a red moon, Sun Yee's wish was granted as she was gifted the ability to harness her emotions and transform into a red panda to protect herself, her village, and her family. As Ming said, the power was meant as a gift and was passed on for generations but became an inconvenience when the world changed.
This sounds a lot like how humans behave in real life. Our ancestors lived a very different life than we did. Whether we are talking about the Great Depression when people lived in scarcity, or all the way back to the cavemen days when it was normal to live in fight or flight mode, our ancestors took on certain ways of living that helped them at the time but that are no longer beneficial for us. There are countless ways to make money today, and so many people are doing it and teaching others to do the same. And since humans are no longer living out in the wild, fearing for their lives, there's no reason to live every day in survival mode. Still, our bodies react as if we are living in the same world as our ancestors.
In Turning Red, the panda was passed down to help others, but since Mei is no longer living in the world Sun Yee was living in, she finds a way to transmute the energy so she can still utilize her inner red panda without needing to use it to protect herself like her ancestors did. I believe this is what we need to do with some of the unhelpful traumas and emotions passed down to us.
I also appreciated the way the family utilizes music, meditation, and their love for each other to come together at the end. Seeing the way Mei accepts herself at the end and the way her relationship with her mother has transformed in the most healthy way possible feels very rewarding after the many ups and downs of Mei's journey throughout Turning Red.
Wow my red pander comes out now and then.Looking forward to next Monday.Thank you for your insight