This meant channeling Shi’s own teen interests, including anime and boy bands. Set in and around Toronto’s Chinatown in 2002, “Turning Red” is a celebration of teenage girls, their experiences and their interests. Although elements of the story and even the mechanics of Mei’s transformation evolved over the course of the production, “it was always going to be a girl going through magical puberty and uncontrollably poofing into this giant, red, hormonal creature.” “I pitched it as a girl going through magical puberty,” said Shi. The Chinese Canadian director describes “Turning Red” as “the most personal and the weirdest” of the feature film ideas she pitched to the studio. “So she draws a mermaid tail, because it’s easier to imagine.”Īlthough Walt Disney Studios as a whole has started producing more inclusive animated features, including “ Moana” (2016), “ Coco” (2017), “ Soul” (2020), “ Raya and the Last Dragon” (2021) and “ Encanto” (2021), a story centered on a modern teenage girl is a first for the historically boy-centric Pixar.Īs she was wrapping up work on her Academy Award-winning 2018 short “Bao” at Pixar, Shi knew she wanted her next film to be a girl’s coming-of-age story.
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“I like to think that Mei, in all of her innocence, doesn’t know how to draw the lower half of a boy,” said Shi, who insists that a lot of tween girls have a mermaid phase. She’ll even show Mei’s secret mer-teen drawings to the exact cute boy who inspired them. “I just want people to discover that girls can be as weird and pervy and strange as boys can be with this movie.” “I haven’t seen that before in a lot of movies, but it is an experience that, if you talk to any female artists, they have had,” said Shi, who recalls during a recent video call having secret sketchbooks of her own while she was growing up. It’s just one of the glimpses into the world of nerdy tween girls that Shi was thrilled to bring to life for “ Turning Red,” the 25th feature from Pixar animation and the first directed solely by a woman. The spell is broken only by a knock on her door by her mother. Director Domee Shi is excited as she discusses one of her favorite scenes from her first feature: when Meilin Lee, her 13-year-old protagonist, “goes down her lusty drawing spiral under her bed with her sketchbook.”Īfter regarding a mindless doodle of a boy she had drawn in the corner of her homework, Mei suddenly gets up from her desk, rolls under her bed and starts frantically drawing picture after picture of her neighborhood crush.