From first-time director Domee Shi, who previously worked as an animator and storyboard artist on films like Inside Out and Toy Story 4, Pixar's Turning Red follows 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian Meilin "Mei" Lee, voiced by Rosalie Chiang, as she wakes up one morning to discover whenever she gets too excited or stressed, she turns into a large red panda because of a secret family quirk. Although the experience would be an inconvenience to any teenager—at least any teen who isn't furry, which is a perfectly healthy way to deal with stress—but Mei is blessed with an overprotective mother, Ming, played by Sandra Oh.

As the 25th Pixar feature, Turning Red is the first directed solely by a woman. Shi co-wrote the screenplay with Julia Cho (Fringe), and recently sat down for an interview with the Los Angeles Times to talk about her inspiration for the Pixar animated film about nerdy tween girls. Considering women make up at least 50% of the world's population and each of them has gone through that awkward tween stage of puberty, there is a pretty large potential audience for this film.

Shi started working on the Turning Red script when she was wrapping up her work on the Academy Award-winning 2018 short “Bao” at Pixar. She knew she wanted her next project to be a girl’s coming-of-age story. “I pitched it as a girl going through magical puberty,” said Shi. Although elements of Turning Red's story and even the mechanics of Mei’s transformation evolved over the course of the production, “it was always going to be a girl going through magical puberty and uncontrollably poofing into this giant, red, hormonal creature.”

Shi told the LA Times that her favorite scene in the film is when the young protagonist draws her crush and "goes down her lusty drawing spiral under her bed with her sketchbook." Recalling how she had her own secret sketchbooks growing, Shi added, "I haven't seen that before in a lot of movies, but it is an experience that, if you talk to any female artists, they have had."

“I like to think that Mei, in all of her innocence, doesn't know how to draw the lower half of a boy,” said Shi, who insists that a lot of tween girls go through mermaid phase. “So she draws [him with] a mermaid tail because it's easier to imagine.”

Related: Turning Red Review: Pixar's Brilliantly Creative Exploration of Puberty

Turning Red Is a Celebration of Tween Girls

Pixar's Turning Red
Pixar

Set in Toronto’s Chinatown in 2002, Turning Red is a celebration of teenage girls and their experiences and interests, which meant channeling Shi's own teen interest like anime and boy bands. By tapping into a style that is considered more "girly" (there's a lot of theory written about the dismissal of content that is deemed too girly or made for teen girls), Shi brought something that many critics are lauding as entirely new for Pixar. Although it's new for Pixar, which has mostly had male protagonists in its films, the look is not new—it's just been dismissed as less than for decades.

Shi, who grew up watching shows such as Sailor Moon, Pokémon, and Fruits Basket, told the Los Angeles Times that one major source of inspiration was anime, saying:

Anime was a huge inspiration for the look of this movie, for the animation style... I’ve always loved how colorful and expressive anime is. How they really exaggerate facial features and character reactions, and you really feel what the characters are feeling at any given moment.

Shi added that anime was also the source of inspiration for the transformation rules and mechanics in Turning Red. “I've always loved how fast and loose a lot of anime play with magical transformation,” said Shi. “They don't really explain too much of the rules of the magic. And everyone kind of just accepts it. We really borrowed that for our movie.”