Within the first five minutes of Pixar’s Turning Red, 13-year-old protagonist Mei Lee and her girlfriends are established as pop music aficionados, as deeply nerdy and informed about their beloved boyband 4*Town as the Rolling Stone crowd are about Dylan bootlegs. The language of expertise is more or less the same: Mei’s sk8r girl BFF Miriam gives her a bootleg CD of the group’s 1999 Australia tour performance complete with “the ‘Girl I Love Your Jeans’ remix” after Mei shows off her knowledge of the band’s choreography. (Call it the Basement Tapes of bell-bottoms.) It’s a delightful tribute to any teen girl’s comprehensive knowledge of her chosen musical love, and the first sign of a film truly dedicated to understanding the depths of a relationship between boyband and fan – one that is often dismissed as superficial and childlike.
Turning Red is a Y2K coming-of-age narrative centred on a Chinese-Canadian tween whose confidence is rattled when she suddenly starts turning into a giant red panda. What we learn is a matrilineal curse passed down through generations is an allegory for the joys and humiliations of puberty: periods, hormonal eruptions, mortifying interactions with cute boys. And few things trigger Mei’s inner panda like 4*Town, the embodiment of a desire that is forbidden yet burgeoning.
