Domee Shi, Growing Up Asian, and Spending Your Early Teenage Years on Deviantart.com
Loh Tze Ning
TD14
2200219J
Final word count: 950
The advancement of technology brought us many things. It brought us new ways to make art and animation, faster modes of communication, channels to broadcast our thoughts and opinions to a wide audience.
With the advancement of technology in animation software, 3D animation has almost completely replaced 2D animation. With Disney’s last 2D feature length film The Princess and the Frog in 2009, traditional animation methods such as cel animation and stop motion animation have been phased out in favour of 3D animation. Animation studios have since been exploring and experimenting with this new medium, producing films that range from stylized to realistic.
As the internet became public domain, social media came into being, and with it, online spaces where people formed communities based on shared interests. It brought communication to a whole new level, and made it incredibly easy for people to share information and make their voices heard, which brought forth a new awareness on social issues. Representation of different cultures and ethnicities in popular media is now more common than it ever was before.
Domee Shi
Domee Shi is a Chinese-born Canadian animator, director and screenwriter, born in 1989 in Chongqing, Sichuan before immigrating to Canada at a young age. She was a storyboard artist for multiple Pixar films, before going on to direct the short film Bao in 2018 and the feature film Turning Red in 2022, thus becoming the first woman to direct a short film and the first woman with sole director’s credit on a feature film for Pixar.
Growing up as an Asian diaspora in a Western country, Shi was influenced by both Eastern and Western media, watching Looney Tunes and Disney films as a child, but also enjoying Ghibli films and anime at the same time. During high school, Shi became the Vice President of her school’s anime club. It was around this time that she started to join online art communities and upload her fan artwork to DeviantArt, where she could follow and communicate with other artists. In 2014, she co-created My Food Fantasies, an animated webcomic in which she drew wacky situations involving food, including one where she gets wrapped in dough, baked into a croissant, and has to eat her way out.
Both Turning Red and Bao are grounded in Asian, specifically Chinese, culture. Shi has said that Turning Red was a semi autobiographical work, and I believe that Bao is also the same, to a certain extent.
Food, Culture, and Family
In Shi’s films, food is portrayed as a thing that brings families together.
In Bao, the mother bonds with her son over food. She takes him to the market as a baby, lets him pick out pastries at the bakery, cooks him food and plies him with pastries when he’s upset. In Turning Red, Mei and her mother, Ming wrap dumplings together as they watch Cantonese dramas in the living room. Ming feeds Mei snacks when she comes home from school and brings her fruits when she’s studying. For these parents, food is how they show affection for their children without saying it outright.
In both films, Shi tells two sides of the same story, parents dealing with their children growing up and growing apart from them, and children in turn dealing with the fact that they are growing into someone very different from their parents that their parents might not approve of.
In Bao, the mother relives her happy memories with her son during his childhood through the bao. In her eyes, she sees him as her precious little baby boy who needs to be protected and coddled, like a fragile, squishy steamed bun. Despite this, however, her son cannot stay a baby forever. He grows up. He wants to play soccer, hang out with his rowdy friends, and much later, get married and move out. Struggling with the fact that her son has grown into his own man and is no longer the child she sees him as, the mother swallows the bun, an action symbolic of her swallowing the hard truth of her son growing up and having to accept it.
In Turning Red, Mei is a big fan of the band 4Town. She listens to their music, buys magazines featuring the band, and even draws pictures of the members in her notebook. She even goes as far as using her red panda spirit to raise money so that she can go to a 4Town concert with her friends. But she does all this without her parent’s knowledge, hiding her drawings under her bed, and lying to her parents that she’s going to a mathlete’s meeting when she’s actually letting people take pictures with her panda spirit in exchange for money. All this she does because she wants to keep her parents’ image of her being their studious, hardworking daughter, afraid that they will think less of her if they find out.
Interestingly, both Mei and the son in Bao do not reject their heritage, nor are they forced to discard their new lives. Mei keeps her red panda spirit instead of sealing it away. She sees it as just another side of herself. In the end, she keeps on working at the temple with her mother, but she still obsesses over boy bands and pop music with her friends, accepting and bringing together these two very different sides of her identity .The son in Bao comes home to reconcile with his mother, bringing her a box of the same pastries that she used to buy for him. He brings his wife home to meet his parents, and the film ends with them wrapping dumplings together at the dining table where it all started.
