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Disney Store Official Turning Red Deluxe Figurine Playset, 9 Pc., Moulded Character Toy Figures for Kids, Includes Mei Lee and Friends

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In fact, it might be a sign of how special Turning Red is that it’s attracting the kind of criticisms that aren’t really controversies at all, but rather baffled, individualized emotional explosions in response to a film that disobeys the expected rules about what it’s supposed to be. If like many other fans you collect Disney figures, then the Turning Red collection is a must-have with nine figures all from the film. The vast majority of the film’s audience seems to adore its main character, a 13-year-old Chinese Canadian girl named Mei, with her proud fannish hobbies and her loyal geek squad friends. And they’ve been loudly celebrating Turning Red’s unique elements: Its early-2000s Toronto setting, its celebration of teenage girlhood, and especially its thoughtful depiction of a child grappling with complicated issues of family, community, and repressed history. The hashtag “ #at13” also began trending, as people articulated just how over-the-top and embarrassing they were at 13, for anyone out there laboring under the mistaken impression that 13-year-olds are cool. All of which is to say that Turning Red gives you a lot of ideas to grapple with. It also gives you a lot to look at. Director Shi and her collaborators have a lot of fun incorporating East Asian influences into the story and animation. You can see touches of Japanese anime in the character design; Mei's panda has the fluffy, oversized proportions of Hayao Miyazaki's Totoro. The action-heavy climax manages to salute kaiju movies like Godzilla and martial-arts epics like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

The Turning Red mug is a must for any Disney collection, with its adorable design and cute features, it can hold all the tea you'll ever need. While Mei's father is shy and mostly stays out of the way, her mother, Ming — a terrific Sandra Oh — is attentive to the point of overbearing. In addition to being super-involved with Mei's studies, Ming rigorously polices her daughter's social life, in hopes that she won't be too influenced by Western ways. For all that we measure out recognition in pangs, the experience of seeing some fragment of yourself onscreen is usually assumed to be a positive one. But the rush of familiarity brought on by Domee Shi’s 2018 short, Bao, made me feel bad in ways I struggled to articulate. I welled up from almost the first frame: The eight-minute film, about a Chinese Canadian empty nester channeling her feelings about her estranged son into an anthropomorphic dumpling, is astonishingly efficient at extracting tears. But I resented as much as admired that effectiveness. It’s hard not to begrudge something that shows you what an easy mark you are when it comes to diasporic pain points so classic as to also be clichés — the controlling first-generation mother, the rebellious Westernized kid, the guilt, the sacrifice, the disappointment.

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But the buzz around the movie in the days since its March 11 release has been tinged with drama, and might well give you the impression that Turning Red is Pixar’s most controversial film since — maybe ever. While that’s probably not true, the dust-ups around Turning Red keep gaining attention and going viral — maybe less because lots of people are mad than because the things a few people are mad about are just ... kind of weird. And that is the genius of “Turning Red,” a radical, brazenly hormonal PG movie that instantly fills a huge void in the lives of awkward, novel female teens who might just be starting to crawl out of their childhood cocoons with a disharmony of mystifying awakenings and sexual feelings. That achievement is perhaps no surprise coming from Pixar, a studio that can always be trusted for a generous dose of reflective, grown-up nostalgia as well as a good old-fashioned coming-of-age saga. After all, weren’t some of the best characters of the fiercely inventive animation house—from the talking dolls of the “ Toy Story” franchise to the corporeal feelings of “ Inside Out,” the rebellious princess of “ Brave,” and the aspiring young musician of “ Coco”—gloriously defined by its signature preoccupations? Still, “Turning Red” (which deserves a lot better than the straight-to-streaming fate Disney has bestowed upon it) feels pioneering and surprising even for the shop behind the groundbreaking animated sci-fi “WALL-E.” For starters, never before has a Disney female ever been asked, “Has the red peony blossomed?” as an inquiry about the start of her menstruation. Okay, maybe not exactly this transform-into-a-big-red-panda situation. But Turning Red may be an unintentional litmus test in the larger culture war: How you react to the idea of kids practicing self-acceptance and defining their own identities may say much more about your methods of parenting than about a film whose climax includes a singalong led by an angel-winged boy band. I've seen Turning Red in a theater and now that I have, I'm really upset that most people aren't going to experience it like this. I don't think I've ever felt more seen by a film like this as an Asian Canadian in the Toronto area.

Now imagine my astonishment during Oscar-winning “Bao” helmer Domee Shi’s masterful animation “Turning Red,” while I watched its 13-year-old central character undergo a similar episode with her own mother! The heroine in question is the overachieving Meilin ( Rosalie Chiang)—Mei for her loved ones—growing up too fast with her budding hormones and changing body amid her Chinese-Canadian family in the Toronto of the early aughts. A slightly dorky straight-A student she may be, but there's nothing anyone could do to stop her from noticing all the good-looking boys—particularly a local store clerk—that she and her best friends frequently gush over. That anyone includes her disciplined, willowy mother Ming ( Sandra Oh), who discovers Mei’s notebook of suggestive heartthrob drawings in furious disbelief. What’s Mei to do if not literally turn red and POOF, transform into a furry, monstrously cute red panda in the midst of navigating all these intense emotions? (Why hadn't I thought of this when I was similarly busted? And more importantly, where was this movie when I was growing up?)Mei and her friends are determined to attend the 4*Town concert, so filmmakers knew they’d need a spectacular venue for the occasion. Artists started with the actual dimensions of Toronto’s SkyDome, then played with the scale to find the sweet spot, allowing the climactic ending to unfold to its greatest potential. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is a gnarly and spiritual fairy tale about what makes life beautiful Effects supervisor Dave Hale and his team studied live concerts to help build the effects for the concert sequences. “We did a bunch of stage fog, pyrotechnics and vapor geysers,” says Hale. It’s certainly a delight to follow Mei once she discovers her inner red panda and figures out that as long as she keeps a cool and collected demeanor sans emotions with a little help from her friends, the pink brute won’t take over. Who knows, she could perhaps even lead a normal life and even have some fun along the way. But that’s easier said than done when you’re a teenage girl defined by your wobbly mood swings and the time you spend with your equally frenzied group of friends. In Mei’s case, her girlhood clan consists of the sharp-tongued Abby ( Hyein Park), nonconformist Miriam ( Ava Morse), and the nonchalant Priya ( Maitreyi Ramakrishnan). Together, the celebrated quartet swing from one trouble to the next, trying to do everything they can to see their dreamy boy band 4*Town in concert. (The five-member band does have some actual bangers in the film, written by Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell.) But with Mei’s plush red panda slightly altering their plans, the friends finds themselves at a crossroads that directly concerns the young Mei’s future. The story is set in the early 2000s, and it follows a 13-year-old girl named Meilin Lee, voiced by Rosalie Chiang, who lives in Toronto's Chinatown. Mei is an obedient overachiever, a straight-A student who spends her free time helping her parents run a temple built to honor their Chinese ancestors.

The culprit: a review, since fully retracted but still archived, written by Sean O’Connell, the managing director of CinemaBlend. O’Connell felt that not only were Turning Red’s Toronto teens impossible for him to relate to, but that even trying “wore [him] out.” Pixar’s turn toward “deeply personal — though less universal — stories,” he feared, “risk[s] alienating audience members who can’t find a way into the story, beyond admiring the impressive animation.” O’Connell described the film’s target audience as “small and incredibly specific” and snarked that it hadn’t “bothered to include plot elements everyone could find engaging.” He also repeatedly dismissed Turning Red’s quirky plot as a giant Teen Wolf rip-off, which kind of implies O’Connell has only ever seen one teenage werewolf movie. In reality, director Domee Shi took much of her inspiration from classic ’90s anime. Her mom instructs her to suppress her feelings and the panda along with it. But then something funny happens: Her friends find out about the panda, and rather than being weirded out by it, they think it's the cutest, coolest thing ever. Soon, Mei is newly popular and having the time of her life, and she starts to wonder: What if the panda, far from being some shameful aberration, is actually the truest expression of her happy, goofy, emotional self? And so Turning Red tells a story about shame, repression and social anxiety — areas that I, like more than a few Asian Americans, know a thing or two about. During the movie, I found myself sometimes wincing in recognition at Mei's tension and embarrassment as she's torn between her family and friends. I also balked at moments that seemed to exaggerate for comic effect, especially when it came to Mei's mother, who's clearly been conceived along the lines of the controversial "tiger mom" stereotype.The controversies, such as they are, range from claims that this film isn’t relatable to insistent discomfort with the depiction of a young woman in puberty, a child having autonomy, and the very reality of — yes, sometimes cringeworthy — 13-year-old girls.

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