100 min | PG | March 11, 2022 | Walt Disney Pictures
A thirteen-year-old in 2002 Toronto worships her mother, aces her tests, and keeps her cool. Then she wakes up as a giant red panda every time her emotions spike. Puberty has never had a better metaphor.
Meilin Lee is thirteen and certain she has herself figured out. She honors her mother, runs her family’s ancestral temple, and chases boy bands with her three best friends. Then she discovers that the women in her bloodline transform into enormous red pandas when their feelings run hot. The panda is not a curse to be cured. It is the part of herself her mother has spent years teaching her to suppress. Domee Shi builds a coming-of-age film where the monster and the girl are the same person.
Rosalie Chiang plays Mei as a tornado of want. She vibrates between dutiful daughter and feral fan, and Chiang sells the whiplash without ever making Mei look unhinged. Sandra Oh plays Ming Lee as a mother whose love arrives as surveillance. Oh tracks Ming from doting to suffocating to wounded, and she never lets the character become a villain. Ava Morse, Hyein Park, and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan voice Mei’s friends as a unit that finishes each other’s sentences and means it. Wai Ching Ho gives Grandma Wu a stillness that makes the older generation’s bargain land with weight.
Shi directs from a script she wrote with Julia Cho, and the craft commits to a specific time and place. The animators borrow the squash and exaggeration of anime, so Mei’s eyes bulge and her face sweats in cartoon waterfalls when embarrassment hits. The 2002 Toronto detail is exact, down to the Tamagotchis and the boy band’s choreography. Ludwig Goransson scores the chaos while the in-movie group 4 Town, written by Billie Eilish and Finneas, delivers the kind of song a thirteen-year-old would actually scream along to. The red panda design stays cuddly and overwhelming at once, which is the whole point.
This is a film about a girl learning that the thing her family fears in her is also the thing that makes her hers. Mei’s choice is not whether to control the panda. It is whether she has to amputate herself to be loved. Shi understands that the messy version of a daughter and the convenient version are not the same girl. She has the nerve to let Mei keep the mess.