I Am Not A Chinese-Canadian Teenage Girl But I Adored ‘Turning Red’
This coming-of-age fantasy is one of Pixar’s best in a long time
I have nothing in common with the hero of Pixar’s new instant animated classic Turning Red, Mei, a spirited thirteen-year-old Chinese-Canadian girl who is trying to survive puberty.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I was thirteen once. Oy. It was scary and intense and when I was Mei’s age I filled notebooks with top-secret doodles about my obsessions, which included robots, spaceships, and, forgive me, boobs.
To be thirteen is to be suddenly walloped by feelings that don’t make sense at first. Boobs? What the hell? I was hypnotized by them. I use to fill page after page with superheroes like Wonder Woman, Rogue, and Starfire that I copied directly from the pages of my favorite comic books. It was beyond my control.
In my defense, they were also in cool action poses. I was particularly good at drawing Starfire’s energy blasts if I do say so myself.
In Turning Red, Mei is in puppy love with the dreamboats of popular boy band 4*Town and she draws cartoons of herself kissing Robaire, one of the members of the NSYNC-like group. Her mother discovers Mei’s drawings and, reader, if my mom had ever discovered my crude hormone-fueled…
