'Turning Red' is a 'love letter' to Asian Canadian girls, says director Domee Shi
CTV
The Canadian director of Pixar's latest outing 'Turning Red' points to innumerable elements that could have torpedoed her mission to spotlight a Chinese-Canadian girl in Toronto wrestling with puberty.
Domee Shi packs it full of Canuck jokes, Asian references, immigrant experiences, thirsty teen girl obsessions and a not-so-subtle reference to menstruation.
Her heroine is Mei, a 13-year-old girl in 2002 Toronto who discovers that she has one big problem: she turns into a big red panda whenever she gets a little too excited or anxious.
Shi marvels that she "never" received pushback on any of those unique elements from the studio, possibly because they were all in her very first pitch, which she made just after the success of her 2018 Oscar-winning Pixar short "Bao."
"I pitched two other ideas that weren't this personal or Canadian, so they had others to choose from," Shi notes in a virtual press junket from Toronto with some of her cast.
