Beware the Red-Furred Monster

A 13-year-old girl becomes a red panda when she loses her cool in Domee Shi’s heartwarming but wayward coming-of-age film.

A quirky Asian teenager transforms into a giant red panda whenever she gets excited.

Meilin Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) is a typical 13-year-old girl: She dances, has crushes on boys and has a cohort of weird but loyal besties who share her obsession with the glossy-lipped members of the boy band 4*Town.

She’s also Chinese Canadian, living in Toronto in 2002, where her family maintains a temple.

Shi finds subtle yet effective ways to illustrate the personalities of even the ancillary characters, from the stiffly applied makeup of Mei’s grandmother (Ho-Wai Ching) to the flamboyant open-toed footwear of the gang of aunties who follow Grandma Lee around.

And the animation of Mei’s hair in her panda form — how it lays flat when she’s calm or spikes upward when she’s mad — reinforces her emotional shifts.

It’s no surprise that these kinds of expressions are where Shi’s direction most shines; as in her 2018 Oscar-winning Pixar short “Bao,” “Turning Red” lives and breathes on the complex emotional relationship between a mother and a child preparing to leave the nest.

And also as in “Bao,” in which a mother raises a steamed bun child from birth to adulthood, here again Shi uses a culturally specific metaphor to convey her characters’ emotions.

This is where “Turning Red” gets sticky: Though the plot’s red panda magic is rooted in its characters’ cultural traditions (the Lees honor an ancestor who defended her family with the power of a red panda), these details aren’t enough to absolve the film of its kid-friendly version of exoticism.

After all, its characters profit off Mei’s cute and foreign transformation.

And when it comes down to the movie’s conflict, the antagonists are the women in Mei’s family.

Or, more accurately, the suffocating cultural traditions and familial expectations that are embodied by the women.

The fact that Mei’s grandmother gets the kind of shady introductory scene that you’d expect of the head honcho in a mobster flick, and that these women share the red panda affliction, means they fall into a formula of cold, emotionless Asian women.

Is the film tackling the stereotype or fulfilling it? The line is too blurry to tell.

By the end, a bit of understanding, empathy and a pandapocalypse reassures us that the stoic Asian dames aren’t the source of the problem but also victims, like Mei.

Though I wonder what the movie would look like if the conflict wasn’t enacted solely in the form of these women.

“Turning Red” offers satisfying morsels despite its messiness, like the few throwbacks to the early aughts, including Tamagotchis and pre-BTS boy band mania.

(4*Town’s criminally catchy songs, written by Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas O’Connell, are It’s too bad that “Turning Red” fumbles its storytelling, because at the very least it has fun when it lets its fur fly.— Wires