Turning Red is the best Pixar movie in years

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Our top recommendation of the week is Turning Red. The new Pixar film “follows 13-year-old Mei (Rosalie Chiang), a spunky Chinese-Canadian middle-schooler living in Toronto in the early 2000s,” writes our reviewer, Petrana Radulovic. “[Mei’s] juggling her devotion to her mother and her duties at the family temple with her budding sense of self. After one particularly turbulent day, she wakes up and discovers that she has transformed into a giant red panda.”

So begins a hilarious, heartfelt adventure that leaves room to unpack tricky universal subjects like our relationships to our parents, our cultures, and our own bodies. Last month, we spoke with the creators of Turning Red about the film’s open portrayal of puberty and periods. Shi also shared four classic anime that inspired the film.

Radulovic says that Turning Red ”unabashedly and jovially embraces its own identity in such a tender way that it aches” and calls the film one of Pixar’s best. We’re bummed for the filmmakers at Pixar that Turning Red isn’t getting a full theatrical release, but selfishly, we’re thrilled that we can watch the movie when we want, as often as we want, on Disney Plus.

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