Catholic Family Movie Review: Turning Red

*Spoilers ahead…Though, we think it’s worth spoiling if you are considering watching this with your kids.

Embracing the Panda

Disney + has been a gift to our family. It's saved us a lot of money to be able to view premiers of new movies upon their release from the comfort of our well-worn-decade-old couch. And as millennial parents, we’ve enjoyed the nostalgia of playing old 90’s and early 2000’s films and shows for our kids. 

So when we saw the trailer for “Turning Red”, we quickly made plans for a family movie night. 

But unfortunately, what looked like a fun spin on introducing big feelings and lessons on how to appropriately address them turned into a spectacle of preteen angst, family dysfunction, and unresolved tensions between a coming of age daughter and a mother who never healed from the wounds of her upbringing.

For Starters

Right off the bat, there was confusion. We weren’t sure who the intended audience for the movie was, but it definitely was not our kids. The 2000’s pop culture reference went over their heads and the tween experience of puberty was equally foreign to them.

Was this really a throwback animated movie for adults?  Or was it meant for the typical Pixar childhood age group?  Either way, it missed the mark by not fully committing to either.

Who/what is the Red Panda?

Then, as the plot unfolds, we meet the Red Panda, the main character's (Mei Mei) ancestral curse: a transformed beastly creature that emerges when she feels big emotions.

The catalyst of this transformation is her mother embarrassing Mei Mei by revealing the implied soft-core porn that she drew to the object of her fantasies.

Once we trudge through the oddly inserted comparison between the main characters experience of the Red Panda and her first menstual cycle, we learn quickly that she can return to her almost-self if she is able to calm herself.

As the story continues, Mei, along with the audience, are still trying to grapple with what the Red Panda is and how it can be controlled.
There was an odd juxtaposition between the main character’s different versions of her Red Panda. The panda was something that came out whenever she felt any strong emotions, both positive and negative. However, at some point in the story her strong positive Red Panda emotions became equated with her “true” self. Besides teaching tweens to embrace their sexual desires (Mei fantasizes about one of her crushes as a mer-man in order to turn into the Red Panda), it also teaches the idea that all our strong emotions can be equated with our true-selves.

Mei is encouraged by her circumstances to expressed her “true” self for socialization and acceptance. But is not equally encouraged to have hard conversations with her mom about the overbearing pressure to overachieve.

Instead of embracing all of herself, we find her outright lying to her family and the movie supports the narrative that her friends are the only love she needs. While this is not an unusual behavior for the age group, the movie does more to affirm the idea that we find real acceptance in our friends, than it does to heal the parent-child relationship.

A Family Trait

Turning red is a curse passed on through the generations to the women of Mei Mei’s family. It happened to each of her female relatives right around the time of becoming a teenager.

Each woman was scarred by the experience (both figuratively and literally), and later given the opportunity to actually bottle up their inner Red Panda and live a “normal” life.

As Mei continues to experience the fluctuations of her feelings and shifts back and forth between her Red Panda (that her friends see and love) and her non-Red Panda form (that her family sees), she continues to find tension between her life with her family and her life with her friends (who she “loves most of all”). Obviously, her friends preferred her panda-self and her family wanted her to be tamed.

To add to the discontinuity, the Red Panda is left as a very vague idea. At one point in the story, the father lets Mei know that he loves how happy she is with her friends as the Red Panda, and that her mom’s Red Panda last came out when Mei’s mother and father were forbidden to marry. This left familial ties scarred and broken. The Panda is painted as good or neutral at best, when clearly some of the actions aren’t.

On the night of the red moon, the time to perform the ritual to bottle up one’s inner panda, all came to a head and generations of pandas battle. At the end of the excitement, all of the women but Mei choose to give up their pandas again. Mei is seen as the only brave one to embrace her inner Red Panda and continue to live as her true-self.

What’s the Lesson Learned?

Here’s our real beef with the film:

The character was encouraged by the end of story to embrace her true self, yet never actually addressed her strong feelings of shame that her mom caused by her unrelenting expectations. Instead of addressing her emotions and getting to the core of her shame, she was encouraged to embrace only the positive aspect of the Red Panda and seemingly ignore the uncomfortable ones that brought life to the transformation in the first place. No real healing in the journey to finding her true self took place.

Further, relational damage was never reconciled. Instead of the secrecy, lying, and inappropriate behavior being acknowledged, everyone moved on with this new normal. Mei was given permission to live life as she wanted and her power to shape shift became a capital gain for her family’s business.

In the end the main character did not learn to fully embrace virtue. We all have strong desires. But what we do with those strong desires is what counts. Both depicted extremes of bottling them up, or fully embracing them as our identity fail! It is by acknowledging strong desires and still doing what we ought to do that we find true freedom.

Mei, instead, embraced the tumultuous Red Panda and was allowed to be herself, put her friends above her family, and never truly reconcile with her mom. Not once did she consider if the embracing of the Red Panda constituted a pursuit of what is good, true or beautiful. Instead the embracing of the Red Panda constituted a pursuit of what felt good and right in that moment.

Final Grade

Overall, our family won’t be watching this movie again and would rather watch movies that centered around values and self-sacrifice. 

We don’t recommend this movie and want to caution families who are thinking of enjoying a movie night with their young kids.