While Shi and Collins didn’t have any hesitation about making Mei’s period an ongoing subject in the film, Collins says they were a little wary about how their Pixar higher-ups would respond. “Everybody on the crew was unapologetic in support of having these real conversations about periods and about these moments in girls’ lives.” It was the first thing we put into production,” producer Lindsey Collins tells Polygon. “It was always in the very earliest versions of the film. And yes, that means mistaken conversations about periods. Mei learns that she transforms every time she experiences extreme emotion, and must navigate this new physical quirk while dealing with her rapidly changing relationship with her mother, along with other tumultuous ups and downs of adolescence. “And all of these changes are happening not just to her body, but to her relationship with her mom and her friends.” “ growing up caught between two worlds, East and West, but also at this time in her life where she’s blossoming into adulthood,” explains Shi.
Her previous Pixar project, the short film Bao, also deals with a complicated first-generation-immigrant mother-child relationship, but she saw Turning Red as a chance to dive into those themes from the child’s perspective. Turning Red is Shi’s feature debut, a coming-of-age story following a Chinese-Canadian protagonist in the early 2000s. “The red panda is a metaphor not just for puberty, but also what we inherit from our moms, and how we deal with the things that we inherit from them,” Shi tells Polygon. (Mei, meanwhile, hides in the shower, more concerned about suddenly having fur.) No one discusses the anatomical machinations of uteri and blood flow, but after plucky protagonist Mei first changes shape and hides in the bathroom, her mother mistakenly believes she’s gotten her period, and brings her supplies and advice about how her body is changing. In fact, the movie openly talks about periods, and doesn’t shy away from the nitty-gritty of puberty. But director and co-writer Domee Shi doesn’t see the topic as taboo, even for a movie geared toward young audiences. Pixar’s new movie Turning Red centers on a girl who uncontrollably morphs into a giant red panda, and the metaphorical connections to other big red turning point in many girls’ lives do not go overlooked.
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