Review of Turning Red (2022) by Enogylop — 12 Mar 2022

From fairytale to furry tail. Much better than expected. Really funny and bold lessons about growing up, the connection between a child becoming teenager and her mother and the rest of the family is very well painted.

Made me think of inside out, who was also talking about a young girl going through transformations in a her brain instead of her body in red alert. But here, the rhythm is better, I laughed a lot, the attention to detail is not really in how things look like (it’s Pixar, looks like Pixar) but how all these characters move, the lips, the hips, the eyebrows, the way they walk, the animation is really fantastic and brings another layer to understand the difference between what we say and what we think or how we feel : you don’t have to show how 5 little things in the brain fight to take decisions, you just have to read the face, an ode to non verbal communication.

The secondary characters are also very good, for example even the dad is such a loving and fun character finding his place among all those women. All in all, I wish everybody could watch this film, as the message behind it, about how we can respect one another even as we are evolving, how love is shown by accepting that others also can change, how over controlling oneself and others has maybe more down sides than giving some space to our inner energy… life is complicated, latest Pixar may have been messy, but this one finally finds the right balance.

Maybe it’s actually about Pixar itself becoming a teenager asking to Mama Disney to let it grow up, and that everything will be ok.