Andrew Barker Senior Features Writer “A Chinese Canadian tween undergoes magical puberty and turns into a giant red panda.” As far as elevator pitches go, it’s not exactly “‘Jaws’ in space” or “snakes on a plane.” But that highly specific logline is the one that Domee Shi used to persuade Pixar to greenlight her feature directorial debut, some half a decade ago when the then-20-something was a budding storyboard artist on the studio’s Emeryville campus.
Shi’s film, “Turning Red,” delivers on every bit of that premise, focusing on a confidently nerdy Toronto girl named Mei and her loving yet strict mother, Ming, whose perfectly ordered lives are thrust into chaos by Mei’s sudden transformation.
The film was released last spring, and immediately notched a number of milestones for the studio: the first Pixar feature solely directed by a woman, the first Pixar feature with all-female creative leads, and only the second Pixar feature directed by a person of Asian descent.
But the particulars of Shi’s identity aside, it also represented the emergence of a singular new voice within the celebrated studio, and everything from its cultural specificity, to its animation style — impressionistic, frantically paced, anime-influenced — to its openness in addressing the messiness of early adolescence (from menstruation and mother issues to the suggestion that a tween girl’s love of a particular boy band might have some extra-musical motivations) felt both of a piece with the Pixar tradition and something invigoratingly new. “From the beginning, we were going to be touching on all the awkward, cringey, embarrassing moments of tweenhood in this movie,” says the 33-year-old Shi, who is receiving Variety’s Creative Impact in Animation
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