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LOS ANGELES, March 7 (UPI) -- Turning Red, premiering Friday on Disney+, is Teen Wolf for girls and pandas. There's a lot more going on because it's Pixar, but the comparison still applies. Meilin Lee (voice of Rosalie Chiang) is a 13-year-old eighth-grader who lives in Toronto. She helps her family run their family temple and overachieves in studies and extracurricular activities.
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Just when Meilin starts to discover boys, she wakes up one morning as a giant red panda. It turns out this is a curse that afflicts all women in the Lee family.
Obviously, Turning Red is a metaphor for puberty. The panda represents the less tangible changes that occur during the teenage years, but kids will enjoy the panda story and maybe the lesson will seep in subtly.
Meilin learns to control her panda by calming herself, but the panda becomes quite popular. So Meilin and her friends sell photo ops with the panda to raise money to see their favorite band in concert and get invited to parties as long as Meilin attends as the panda.
In addition to adapting to her body's changes, Meilin learns that with great power comes great responsibility. That's always a worthwhile lesson, which is why it shows up in so much entertainment.
Yes, being a giant animal has risks, but nothing in life is without risks. Perhaps human hormones aren't usually life-threatening, but sometimes they are.
As much as controlling one's inner panda is everyone's responsibility, Turning Red also speaks to parental conflict. The same emotions that confuse Meilin also confuse her mother, Ming (Sandra Oh).
Ming wants to be supportive and helpful, but doesn't see how she's stifling Meilin with overprotection and invading her personal space. A parent may think it's safest to suppress the panda, but the only viable long-term solution is to cope with it.
The theme is even more poignant on the parental side, because everyone is confused. It's just that adults make the rules, so they bear even more responsibility for sorting out their confusion.
Turning Red really captures the energy of a teen movie with fast cuts and dialogue. A concert is the most important event of a teenager's life, and family obligations threaten to interrupt it.
Most families don't have supernatural ceremonies conflicting with concerts, but the stakes are palpable. Any kid resents being forced to attend their family's boring important events.
The fictional boy band, 4 Town, sounds familiar enough to be a spoof, but still legitimately catchy. The original music is by Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell.
During the difficult period of growing up, entertainment often can be the lifeline that helps kids through. Both overprotective parents and their kids will identify with Turning Red.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001 and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
