There are quite a few things that are considered good sport to make fun of. Boy bands like One Direction, twee romance novels like Twilight, any number of chick flicks. And not only has it been openly acceptable to mock such things, their audiences are regularly caught in the cross-hairs. Not many people tend to take a step back and considering why it’s okay to mock the things that young girls and woman are interested in; it’s just… part of ‘the culture’.
And before this sounds like I’m getting all holier-than-thou, I did my fair share of this shit too. ‘Boy bands are gay’, ‘chick flicks are stupid’, ‘what kind of damaged freak could possibly enjoy Twilight?’; teenaged me was way more judgemental than the me that decided to make a career out of judging media. I can’t say that I don’t hold onto at least some of those opinions today, but the notion that it’s perfectly cool to mock people just because they find joy in something? Yeah, that’s unbelievably not okay.
This Pixar film feels like it was designed from the ground-up to correct such things, as its main character Mei (Rosalie Chiang) and her best friends (Ava Morse’s Miriam, Maitreyi Ramakrishnan’s Priya, and Hyein Park’s Abby) are all-in in their love for girly things. Boys, boy bands, cute things, toys, fluffy things; it is quite remarkable how well the animation sells the sheer glee in their facial expressions around all of this. The story is set in Canada, and maybe it’s because of how much Degrassi I’ve taken in over my lifetime, but this feels like it’s cut from a similar cloth about presenting teens and tweens as naturally as possible. They’re hyperactive, they’re laidback, they’re shy, they’re outgoing, and sometimes all at the same time; this is the reality, not what parents wish was the reality.
And for a coming-of-age story, that connection to tangible emotional reality is very important. When Mei suddenly wakes up one morning to discover she’s turned into a giant red panda, the visuals tap into some nice kid-friendly body horror to show what puberty feels like. The hormonal rush of heightened emotion, the knowing and feeling of… things happening to one’s body that are beyond their control, a sense of shame that such things are happening at all; it all fits quite well. Sure, it’s tied directly to the AFAB experience in its period allusions, but there’s still something I found quite relatable about that need to mask one’s true feelings and behaviours for fear of what they might say.
To that end, we have Sandra Oh as Mei’s mother Ming… and good lord, the amount of parental guilt she dishes out here makes this one of the more surprisingly stressful sits I’ve had all year. She taps into something I keep noticing in reference to East Asian familial structures about how much weight is put on maintain it over maintaining one’s own structure as a person, and in Ming, we get some serious Tangled-level control issues and domineering. She represents Disney once again dipping into the warmed-over waters of generational trauma for their drama, but it actually works out really well here. Partly because there’s enough cultural context surrounding it that it’s only part of the larger story being told, but mainly because the personal connections made to Mei (and even Ming after a fashion) give it the right push to succeed.
And succeed it does, telling a story about how reinforcing shame over the insecurities of others, and often because of their own insecurities, can… well, turn rather monstrous the more it goes on. It reclaims a good few decades’ worth of collective hatefulness towards girls being allowed to be girls, and embraces the cringe. It smacks away the idea that demanding conformity and suppression of self out of those who are already going through particularly stressful situations, and are still trying to figuring who their self even is, and between the excellent animation and music (Main soundtrack by Ludwig Gรถransson, boy band songs written by Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connor? Yes please!), it’s another showing that Pixar knows their ish.
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