“Turning Red” is one of the realest movies I’ve ever seen about the adolescent experience, wtf
this is such a galling reminder that stories about fathers and sons get framed as “universal” but stories about mothers and daughters are “niche” and “not everyone can relate”
Just fold the studio into Disney and kill it already. Make Toy Story sequels till the sun fucking burns out. Love how this shift conveniently happened when more woman/POC were really pushing to direct their own stories. Defining their experiences as not "universal" is saying the quiet part aloud.
Shock! The exclusionary position is also hideously anti-art.
"The studio's movies should be less a pursuit of any director's catharsis"
I'm gonna stop you right there, that's exactly what movies should be, and if you can't find commonality in someone else's catharsis, I don't even want to know you
Exactly! And look at the films like Turning Red and Elemental that came from exactly that. They're so much deeper than their films assembled by committee. I want to see that deepest darkest dream that's been bubbling away in someone for their entire life - not a movie assembled from scraps.
I don’t want the movie landscape to be dominated by the kinds of financially comfortable reactionaries who regard themes & analysis the way a sideways teflon pan might regard a stick of warm butter.
“But movies shouldn’t be political! They should always be mindless entertainment, telling easy-to-digest stories about men & boys who are exactly like me that confirm all my beliefs and never make me feel big, scary, complicated girly emotions!” Stop it! Stop it!! Stop it!!!!
I dunno about that. Moana was pretty dang good. That movie managed to make the ocean, a faceless, amorphous blob, into a character that had sass. Turning Red was good, but it's not entirely without competition for the number one spot.
I’ll have to check it out at some point. To be fair I am not a big movie watcher so I haven’t seen them all. But turning red actually interested me because of the setting (canada!) and subject matter. It remains the only kids entertainment media I’ve seen that focuses on menstruation
And given about half of kids will menstruate in their lives it feels a bit ridiculous that kids media talks about it so little.
I guess part of why I love it is it made my child self feel deeply seen in a way I have never otherwise experienced before or since
I had heard ＊so much＊ about Turning Red dealing with menstruation that I half expected it to hyperfixate on it. Like it was going to be the entire thesis of the movie. But that goes to show how little the media handles it for it to generate such a strong response in so many people.
But Turning Red was just the full teenage disaster experience. Hands down the most mature and down to earth movie about becoming a teenager. One of the only movies to acknowledge lust! WHERE DID THIS COME FROM, DISNEY‽ And the mortification your parents can bring upon you. It was SO comprehensive!
I mean, I'll be honest, I only watched either of them because of my niece.
Moana is just utterly gorgeous, stirringly, and the story is both epic and intimate simultaneously. The soundtrack oscillates from sing-along to sweeping instrumentals like you would get out of movies like The Little Mermaid.
I cried in the cinema when I watched Brave because it hit so hard that the main character was not a male character. AND that it would have been Pixar's first movie by a female director, had they not fired her. I am so angry at Pixar for favouring male voices for so long.
Their reasoning makes no sense. Luca was the #1 streamed movie in 2021 & #9 in 2022. Turning Red was #2 in 2022. If that doesn't count as 'clear mass appeal' I don't now what does.
Which kind of makes me think it was never about money or 'clear mass appeal' but instead putting anyone who's not a white male back in a box they've fought tooth and nail to break out of
There is def some of that going on. It also doesn't help that Luca & Turning Red were released straight onto streaming and thus didn't recoup their budgets. But overall I think it's part of the larger distribution problem. Films used to have more opportunities to make money.
First in cinema, then when the dvd was released, and finally on tv. Streaming has disrupted that, while not being a financially viable business model (even after residuals have been cut down for the creatives). Instead of fixing the system studios lean into presumed 'safe' options.
"We need to make stories with mass appeal, instead of focusing on uncommon, difficult-to-relate-to, niche experiences like [checks notes] having a mom, or being thirteen years old."
(I don't wanna erase the reality that not everyone has one or more moms, and not everyone gets to be thirteen, but I think it's safe to say these experiences are not generally regarded as rare.)
I watched Turning Red with my son (who was 22 at the time) and he enjoyed it as much as I did. It's gross that Disney assumes audiences only want carbon copies of their own stories or that there's nothing relatable about a 13yo Chinese Canadian girl. What a bleak, boring, low bar for storytelling.
They don't even advertise them, then wonder why nobody watches them!! Turning Red and Luca were two of my favorite Pixar films in recent years and I didn't even know about them until seeing friends online say how meaningful and real the stories and characters were.
Turning Red so accurately nailed the experience of being a 13 year old girl that is my go to example for that age and the importance of own voices in storytelling. I'm neither Canadian nor Chinese but I could still relate. Not universal my ass.
I was JUST talking to my husband the other night about how in good storytelling you can tell the story of one specific person and it should be relatable and I used Turning Red as an example so this is super frustrating
I'm an old white guy and I thought Turning Red was one of the better Pixar films in quite a while.
As someone else noted, what Disney really wants has nothing to do with the film itself, but tie-ins to toys they can sell, cf Star Wars.
They bombed epically with a Toy Story spin-off, so… they’re going to focus more on sequels and spin-offs.
They’re gonna be the only ones surprised when nobody pays $30 a seat to watch Cars 4.
Turning Red is absolutely my favorite Pixar movie. It was so refreshing to see a movie where there wasn't some scenery chewing overtly evil villain, and the themes (and humor) were amazing.
This is so fucking dumb. So shortsighted.
That's why we need more women, queers, trans and non-white folx in charge of these studios and creative outlets. White men like me have been too comfortable for too fucking long doing the same shit over and over again.
this is so crazy to me because I loved UP as a kid even though there was no way I could have "universally related" to a miscarriage and eventually becoming a widower?? like what do they even mean lol
I loved Turning Red, and I don't think I'm in a space to comment on the impacts of framing it with my gender weirdness and knowing I never had Mei's adolescence and how the panda thing aligns with female puberty and - just tell more stories like this so I don't have to put it all on one movie, kay?
