Our pandas, ourselves

polygon.com:

In the lead up to the release of Pixar’s Turning Red, director Domee Shi brought up a question she’d heard repeatedly about her animated short Bao, a fairy tale about a Chinese mother raising a dumpling as her son. “A lot of people kept asking me: ‘Why is Bao a boy? Why is this little dumpling a boy?’” Shi told reporters in a presentation. “And I was like, ‘Oh, because I only had eight minutes to tell this story. For a mother/daughter story, I’d need an entire feature film to unpack that.’”

With her theatrical debut, Turning Red, Shi finally got to do that unpacking. The movie centers on 13-year-old Meilin “Mei” Lee (Rosalie Chung), a spunky middle-school student, and her stern mother, Ming (Sandra Oh). The two are very close, but Ming expects perfection and obedience out of Mei, who is slowly growing into her own person. As she hits adolescence, she starts finding it hard to balance her budding sense of self with her familial loyalties. All of this is exacerbated when Mei wakes up one morning and discovers that she now turns into a giant red panda when she’s overcome with emotion — a quirk all the women in her family share. Traditionally, all the Lee women have suppressed their inner pandas through a magical controlling ritual, but as the date approaches, Mei starts to wonder if she really needs to get rid of her panda.

[Ed. note: This article contains major spoilers for the end of Turning Red.]

Mei has been told to hide her panda from the world. Her mother and her other female relatives see their pandas as a source of shame. They tuck it away inside jewelry they continue to wear after their individual rituals. But in spite of what they tell her about the family legacy, Mei finds that her peers think her red panda is