Domee Shi embodies a lot of firsts. She is the first woman to direct a Pixar short (Bao). She’s also the first woman of color to win the Academy Award for best animated short film, also for Bao. Now she’s the first Asian woman to direct a Pixar feature, and the first woman, period to direct a Pixar movie alone. That film, Turning Red, is a coming-of-age tale about Meilin “Mei” Lee, a 13-year-old Chinese Canadian who turns into a giant red panda when her emotions overwhelm her—and the mayhem that ensues among her traditional family and boy-band-loving friends.

Like Shi, Mei is an outlier: Though all the women in her family have an inner red panda, she’s the first one who learns to embrace her alter ego. But characters of color changing into nonhuman forms is not a new trope in the Disney/Pixar world. Kuzco, an Incan emperor, turned into a llama in The Emperor’s New Groove (2000), while Kenai, an Inuit boy, transformed into a bear in Brother Bear (2003). Tiana, the first Black Disney princess, took the form of a frog for longer than the form of a human in 2009’s The Princess and the Frog. Miguel, a Mexican 12-year-old aspiring musician, became a skeleton for about an hour of Coco (2017). Joe, a Black jazz musician and teacher, was a blue spirit blob for most of Soul (2020). As critics have pointed out, these nonhuman transformations erase and minimize the very existence of animated characters of color.

Shi was very aware of this problem, and told Vanity Fair she was “careful to avoid” the trope. Turning Red isn’t about Mei being trapped inside the body of a red panda; it’s “a metaphor for all of the messiness inside of her that wants to come out,” she says. Mei’s ability to poof back and forth between red panda and human led her to see the value in both forms. Shi was also vigilant about creating a diverse cast of human characters to surround Mei, including her Chinese Canadian family and multicultural Asian friends. Ultimately, she wanted Mei and her red panda form to inspire audiences—especially Asian girls—to “take up space…be big and loud and hairy and messy and imperfect. And [recognize] that’s beautiful too.” 

So rather than erasing Mei’s Asian human form, Shi sees the red panda as an unexpected way to depict puberty. “The idea of this girl uncontrollably poofing into a giant red hormonal animal just was so perfect of a metaphor and so irresistible,” she says. In fact, Shi partly based Mei on her adolescent self: “I was definitely Mei when I was 13, and I still identify with her now. I was that good little mama’s girl who one day, BOOM, puberty hit. I was bigger, hairier, more emotional, and fighting with my mom almost every day. And making the movie was a reason to go back in time and unpack what was happening.”

The red panda is not only a new physical shape, but also a form of release for Mei. She grows more independent and outspoken—able to verbalize her true desires to her overbearing but loving mother, and breaking the stereotype that women from East Asian cultures are quiet and meek. At the same time, Shi warns viewers not to pass judgment on Mei’s grandmother, aunties, or mother, who “grew up in a generation in a world that was less welcoming, less accepting of that form.” She points out that these women “didn’t have Mei’s friends, and this support system of people who love her unconditionally and celebrate that messy side of her.”

Domee Shi takes her responsibility as a trailblazer very seriously. “You feel that weight and that pressure of being the first, also because there’s a scarcity of our stories in the media,” she says—even if she’s also “but one humble nerdy Chinese Canadian girl trying to tell one very specific story.” Shi helped assemble a team of Asian creatives and consultants to broaden the perspectives represented in Turning Red. “Our writer Julia Cho was able to offer her perspective being Korean American. Rona Liu, our production designer, is Chinese American, and immigrated a little bit later and had a slightly different experience with her family and her mom. We worked with cultural consultants from the [Toronto] Chinatown community, because I’m not from the Chinatown community.” It’s an authentic approach to storytelling informed by her understanding of the diversity within the global Asian community—and a refreshing change from Hollywood’s history of misrepresenting Asian cultures.

Shi also hopes to use her platform to lift up the directors following in her footsteps. “I want to pay it forward for sure, and I’m really excited about the new filmmakers coming out of Pixar: all of the new women, the new women of color. I really hope that with this movie it can just make it a little bit easier for filmmakers…to be able to tell their stories and have their voices heard as well.”

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