‘Turning Red’ Review: A Growing Girl Becomes a Red Panda. So Where’s the Problem?

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticPuberty is a monster — or more aptly, an adorable, uncontrollable giant panda — in Pixar’s “Turning Red.” An Oscar winner for her imaginative smothering-mother short “Bao,” helmer Domee Shi makes a worthy addition to the boys-club studio’s relatively small circle of feature directors, exploring another complicated Asian American (technically, Chinese-Canadian) parent-child dynamic, this time between a perfectionist tiger mom and the high-achieving yet deeply repressed teenage daughter who’s dying to let out her inner freak just a little.For decades, boys could look to werewolves and the Incredible Hulk as colorful metaphors for mood swings and aggro outbursts, while girls have had considerably fewer models to draw on for the changes they face in adolescence — which is where Shi’s perky puberty allegory proves such a welcome innovation.

One morning, after the most humiliating incident of her young life, 13-year-old Meilin Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) wakes up as a giant red panda — the reddish-brown, ringtail fox-like cousin of Beijing’s black-and-white Olympic mascot, rendered here as a big, cutesy-wootsy teddy bear.

Turns out, Mei triggered a magic spell that’s been passed down through female members of her family for generations, and which proves more than a little inconvenient in early-aughts Toronto.

Mei’s typically attentive mom, Ming (Sandra Oh), is surprisingly slow to recognize what her daughter’s going through, mistaking Mei’s predicament for her first period.