21 “Turning Red” Behind-The-Scenes Facts That Anyone Totally Obsessed With Pixars Latest Should Know

1.

In the Disney+ documentary Embrace the Panda: Making Turning Red, director Domee Shi explained why the red panda was the “perfect animal” for the movie and its main character, Mei. Shi said, “Like, red pandas are very attached to their moms. They sleep all day. They eat bamboo, but they’re not supposed to eat bamboo; like, bamboo doesn’t give them enough nutrients. So I kind of imagine it’s just like a lazy teenager just eating chips and sleeping all day.”

She went on, “They’re native to China. And then also, it’s like red and white, like Chinese but also like the colors of the Canadian flag, too. So it felt like the perfect animal to tell this story about this Chinese Canadian teenage girl.” Later on in the documentary, Shi calls the red panda “a metaphor for magical puberty.”

2.

Shi expanded on the puberty metaphor in an interview with IndieWire, explaining that turning into a panda against your will is an analogue for that moment in adolescence when “all of a sudden, we’re covered in body hair, we smell funky, our emotions are all over the place, and we’re hungry like all the time.”

3.

Turning Red is the first feature film that Domee Shi has directed. Producer Lindsey Collins said in Embrace the Panda, “Domee is a force of nature. She’s a first-time feature director. It’s been a while since I worked with a first-time director before, and I’m loving it.”

4.

Shi directing Turning Red was a first not only for her, but for Pixar as well. According to the New York Times, Shi is the studio’s first sole female director of a feature-length film. She was also the first female director of one of the studio’s famed shorts: 2018’s Bao, for which she won an Oscar.

5.

Shi told IndieWire that following the release of Bao, Pixar asked her to pitch three movie ideas, one of which was Turning Red.

Shi said, “Where did this wacky story come from? Back in 2017, as I was promoting [Bao], a lot of people kept asking me: ‘Why is Bao a boy?’ Because I only had eight minutes to tell the story. For a mother-daughter story, I needed an entire feature film to unpack that.”

6.

Here’s a peek at some of the potential titles for the movie shown in Embrace the Panda. Personally, I’m a fan of My Neighbor Toronto and P.M.S. (Panda Mayhem Story), though A Girl and a Panda has some straightforward appeal.

7.

Billie Eilish and Finneas are a part of the Turning Red team: According to NME, they wrote the songs performed by Mei’s favorite band, 4*Town. The titles of the tracks, in all their early 2000s glory, are “1 True Love,” “U Know What’s Up,” and “Nobody But U.” Finneas also sang on the tracks and voiced Jesse, one of the members of the band.

8.

Shi told IndieWire that she got Billie and Finneas on board by making them a scrapbook of Mei.

9.

In an interview with Slate, Shi said that it was important to her to “take boy bands seriously in this movie.” She explained, “Boy bands are often kind of ridiculed in media — as a lot of things that teen girls like are — but when you’re that age, boy bands are our gateway into the opposite sex. Into boys, into relationships, into the concepts of love and dating and heartbreak.” She added that when directing the 4*Town sequences, she told animators to “Really treat this like an Oscar-nominated movie. Go deep, go dramatic with the eyes and the face. Really earnestly make me feel like he’s speaking to me.”

10.

In the same interview, Shi revealed why Aaron Z. is secret 4*Town super-fan Tyler’s favorite member of the band. She said, “Tyler really bonds with him because he’s also — both of them are Blasian. So he really sees himself in Aaron Z.”

11.

Shi noted that while she wasn’t as obsessed with any one boy band like Mei is, her fandom of choice was the Harry Potter franchise. She said, “That was the thing that was the glue for me and my friends. We would line up for the book releases. We’d go to the movies, we’d read fan fiction, we’d draw fan art. That was my 4*Town.”

12.

The fact that 4*Town has five members served two purposes: One, it was funny, and two, the number four was narratively important to Mei’s mother Ming’s distrust of the band. Shi explained, “Oh, one other reason for Ming to disapprove of 4*Town, because four is a very unlucky number in Chinese culture. So wouldn’t it be funny if she just saw her daughter covered in fours?”

13.

Visual effects supervisor Danielle Feinberg recalled in Embrace the Panda that Domee Shi established a “coffee time” to “keep in touch with the crew” after everyone had to start working from home at the beginning of the pandemic. Feinberg said, “I’ve been really surprised because we routinely get a hundred and something people coming to it.”

14.

By the way, Danielle Feinberg is the “first woman in 20 years at Pixar” to be a visual effects supervisor. In Embrace the Panda, Feinberg revealed that she “became a mother for the first time” to twins while working on Turning Red. Feinberg reflected, “You know, there’s days where it feels completely overwhelming, I would say. But I am also now a year and a half into being a mother, and I am two years into this position. I love both things dearly, and it’s hard to imagine not having them now.”

15.

Domee Shi is an only child, and her parents both encouraged her artistic pursuits (with her father focusing on visual art and her mother on creative writing). Shi’s mother organized her childhood writing in a binder, for which she wrote a foreword and a table of contents. She got a chance to show it off in Embrace the Panda.

16.

Shi’s parents also kept all her sketchbooks, and when presented with one drawing, she recalled that it was for a “fan art contest that I entered where it’s like, ‘Draw Draco’s children.'”

17.

Aspects of production designer Rona Liu’s appearance were incorporated in Mei’s design. In Embrace the Panda, Liu recalled that the “dip in [my] lip” and her “really patchy eyebrows” both became a part of Mei’s look. She said, “When that part of myself gets celebrated, and the director’s like, hey, I like that, let’s put it in our main character, you’re like, hey, why did I hate that for so long?”

18.

In Embrace the Panda, Shi said, “We’re paying homage to anime throughout the entire movie. You can see it in the expressions and the acting, the starry eyes in Mei when she sees a boy that she really, really loves.”

19.

One of the inspirations for the look of Turning Red was the 2010 live-action film Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Shi told IndieWire, “I always loved how that film utilized a lot of comic book stylization when it came to the fight scenes, when it came to cutting, and the camera movements and snap zooms, even the fast-paced humor. It was really cool to see how [director Edgar Wright] was able to get that energy in live action.”

20.

When asked in an interview with Entertainment Weekly about the “most rewarding” scene to direct, Shi responded, “It has to be that scene with her drawing under the bed. It was there from the very first version of the script. I knew that she had to go into a passionate, lusty drawing spiral that gets interrupted by her mom. … I definitely had my own secret sketchbook that to this day my mom has never found.”

21.

And finally: Shi told Entertainment Weekly that since Pixar has “the tradition of having an Easter egg for the next film in our movies,” there was a 4*Town reference hidden somewhere in 2021’s Luca.