Turning Red (2022)

There's a version of Turning Red that could've been one of Pixar's best. The setup is genuinely promising: a bright, overachieving thirteen-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl starts spontaneously transforming into a giant red panda whenever her emotions get the better of her. That's puberty, cultural pressure and the messy business of growing up, all rolled into one irresistibly daft, visually rich concept. And the film knows it. It leans into the metaphor with confidence, sets itself in early-2000s Toronto with a specificity that's genuinely refreshing, and brings real warmth to the details of its world. Dumpling-making, boy band obsession, the particular suffocation of being a good daughter who desperately wants to stop being quite so good. There's a lot to like here.

So why did I come away feeling so underwhelmed?

The animation is vibrant, probably among the studio's most expressive and stylised work in recent years. The voice cast is full of energy, and Rosalie Chiang as Mei brings a fizzing, likeable charm to the lead role. There are laughs. There are a few genuinely sweet mother-daughter moments. I wasn't bored. But "not bored" is a low bar for a studio that's made me sob at the opening ten minutes of a film about a marriage, or feel genuine grief over a tin toy.

The problem is that Turning Red follows a coming-of-age arc so familiar you could recite the beats before they happen. Rebellion. Embarrassment. Self-acceptance. Reconciliation. It's all competently handled, but competently is the word. The emotional moments land softly rather than deeply. You feel a warm glow rather than anything that sticks around past the credits. And while the film celebrates Chinese-Canadian culture with obvious affection and care, it sometimes reaches for broad comedy in a way that quietly undercuts that authenticity. The friends are fun company but they're thinly sketched, and the central conflict wraps up with an ease that left me wanting the story to push just a little harder.

There's also a tonal unevenness that the film never quite solves. It swings between zany slapstick and sincere family drama, and the bridge between the two isn't always there. Some scenes feel like they belong to different films entirely. The silliness can be charming, but it occasionally deflates moments that were building towards something real. It reminded me a bit of watching a very confident short film that's been stretched to feature length, all the energy of the premise without quite the substance to sustain it.

Compare it to Pixar's best and it suffers. Inside Out took a similarly abstract psychological concept and made it ache. Coco handled family, culture and generational expectation with a depth that Turning Red doesn't quite reach. Even The Hunchback of Notre Dame, a film that took real risks with tone and darkness in its family animation, felt braver in what it was willing to put on screen. Turning Red plays it safer than its premise suggests it should.

None of which makes it bad. It really isn't. It's cute, it's colourful, it's occasionally funny, and kids will have a perfectly good time with it. If you've got little ones or a soft spot for the early-2000s aesthetic, there's genuine fun to be had. But I kept waiting for the moment that would make it special, the scene that would grab me somewhere unexpected, and it never quite came.

Two and a half stars. Pleasant, well-intentioned, and gone from my head almost immediately. Pixar can do so much better, and it has.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2022  | Watched: 2026-04-20

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Disney Plus
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
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