Mar 12, 2022

"Getting Red" Review Roundup: Domee Shi Steers Pixar in a New Direction

“Magical puberty transformation” are words you'd never hear a Pixar director use to describe their film while the studio was under the creative leadership of John Lasseter. But he's history now, and Pixar has entered a new era of storytelling under the direction of Pete Docter – an era emphasizing stories that are more personal, intimate, and reflective of filmmakers who are not middle-aged white men.

Turning Red is Pixar's 25th feature film, yet the first feature in the company's illustrious 36-year history that has a solo woman director. The director is Domee Shi, who was also the first woman director of a Pixar theatrical short, Bao.

Shi's turn as Pixar director isn't merely cosmetic, as we've pointed out before. The studio invited women to occupy key creative roles in all areas of production, lending real authenticity to Shi's vision of young womanhood. As the New York Times put it in a profile of Shi, “Turning Red tells an unabashedly female story - so much so that it reads as a corrective to the Woody-Buzz-Flik-Sully-Mike-Mater-Lightning-Luca bromances in which Pixar has specialized.”

The internet was predictable in its early reactions to the trailer, full of nonsensical takes on social media, and one review that was so ridiculously indefensible that its publisher, Cinemablend, took down the piece.

Now that it's out – on Disney+ and not theatrically – the general consensus of reviewers is that it's a quirky and unique project that holds its own among Pixar's iconic catalog.

Turning Red currently holds an excellent 95% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes. The general public though still doesn't quite know what to make of it; they've given it an icier reception, with a 66% score on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing. The wide gulf between critics and audiences is abnormal for a Pixar film, but then again this isn't your typical Pixar – and that may be Shi's biggest accomplishment: broadening the idea of what a Pixar film can be.

Here's what the reviewers are saying:

In a Mashable review, Kristy Puchko praises the expressiveness of the characters:

Kate Sánchez in a review for But Why Tho- relates the mother-daughter relationship to her own experience growing up as a brown person:

Tomris Laffly on RogerEbert.com finds the connective tissue between Turning Red and past Pixar productions, suggesting that the film may not be all that different from the studio's other efforts:

Jessica Kiang of Rolling Stone speaks about the allegorical implications of the panda:

A notable voice of dissent is Richard Roeper in the Chicago Sun-Times, who calls the film “ultimately underwhelming”: