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Turning Red


Turning Red
Disney Pixar offers another lushly mounted, but overly complex story rich with universal cinematic themes called Turning Red that offers a fun story but, as with most Disney Pixar features, tests viewer patience with too many endings.

This is the story of Meilin, a hyperactive and energetic Asian teen who lives in Toronto and runs a tourist attraction with her mother. One day, Meilin learns that she has a family curse that, when she looses her temper, turns her into a giant red panda. She initially learns that if she can control her temper, she can control her inner panda, but her mother ...
confesses that the curse can only be removed during a special ceremony that she has to wait a month for. In the meantime, Meilin tries to live with her curse, while learning to take advantage of it as well.

Director and co-screenwriter Domee Shi has created a fairy tale that borrows from a lot of other television and film works like Clueless, The Incredible Hulk, and Teen Wolf and then wraps it around the atmosphere of the TV show Kim's Convenience. The story is centered around a delightful central character, that the story takes a little too much time to introduce along with her problems, but the story does waver in terms of how much power she has over this curse and how, of course, her family spends the majority of the running time keeping the curse a secret, leading to at least two too many endings, a Pixar staple.

The film is beautifully mounted with splashy animation and there is standout voicework from Rosalie Chiang as Meilin and Sandra Oh as her mother, I just wish it had been a little less leisurely getting where it's going and then wrapping up.