The One Thing You’ll Never Be Able to Unsee In Pixar’s ‘Turning Red’

It’s a Disney Pixar movie with a puberty twist.

After the success of Encanto (2021), Turning Red (2022) is Walt Disney Studio’s new coming-of-age family movie with a soft, fluffy main character.

The Pixar film follows a teenage girl named Mei Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) who finds herself turning into a giant red panda when her emotions get out of control. The official trailer highlights the difficult mother-daughter relationship between Mei and her mother, Ming Lee (voiced by Sandra Oh), as she balances being perfect with being herself.

But after watching female director Domee Shi’s movie on Disney+ after its March 11 release, we couldn’t help but notice a throwback to a certain British stop motion character that we now cannot unsee.

The Disney Pixar movie, with songs by Billie Eilish, has received critical acclaim for its plot, humor, animation, and vocal acting, with many praising director Domee Shi’s red panda analogy of puberty, mother issues, and teenage emotion.

This week, a controversial review for the animated movie was revoked by CinemaBlend. The review by managing director Sean O’Connell was pulled offline after being called “sexist” and “racist” after the reviewer said that the film’s appeal was limited because it’s set in the Asian community of Toronto.

The animation style directed by Domee Shi is definitely different from what we’re used to from Pixar and Pete Docter – including its famous franchises Finding Nemo, Toy Story, Inside Out, and The Incredibles. 

But one thing stood out to us when watching the movie. The animation style of Mei Lee (Rosalie Chiang) reminded us of British cartoon icon.

Look at those wide grins – very similar, right?

You may recognize the two on the right as Wallace & Gromit, the main characters from a classic British stop-motion comedy franchise created by Nick Park of Aardman Animations. The animated series centres on Wallace, an eccentric, cheese-loving inventor and his friend Gromit, a silent yet loyal anthropomorphic dog.

The first short film featuring Wallace and Gromit was A Grand Day Out back in 1989, followed by The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave. Park’s first full-length feature film was Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), which earned 3 Academy Awards.

Wallace is famous for his love of Wensleydale cheese, his crazy inventions, and his wide smile – which we couldn’t help but notice in Turning Red. 

Pixar Animation Studios created a beautiful and stylish movie, full of cultural references and 90’s nostalgia including a boy band called 4*Town (based on the Backstreet Boys). But when we watched the new red panda Disney+ movie for the first time, we all immediately recognized the wide, toothy grins.

And sorry, after we noticed the similar smiles, we couldn’t unsee it – and now you may not too!

Turning Red was originally scheduled to be released in theaters in the United States on March 11, 2022, by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures after both Soul (2020) and Luca (2021) were released directly to Disney’s streaming service in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the Omicron variant increased, however, Disney announced that the movie, starring Sandra Oh, would release on Disney+, a decision that drew backlash from some Pixar employees.

Inspired by Domee Shi’s experiences in Toronto, the film began development in 2018 after she pitched it to Pixar in October 2017. It is the first Pixar film solely directed by a woman and the second to feature an Asian lead character, Mei Lee, after Up (2009).

After an eagerly-awaited family movie night, we ultimately thought that the movie didn’t feel like a Pixar story. The animation was odd, the metaphors too obvious, and the emotion not really there.