What Turning Red’s Chinese chant ritual means, and how Pixar did it

Viewers tuning in to Pixar’s animated movie Turning RedYou might be able to guess what characters say during the two crucial sequences in which they start. Chant in Cantonese In one scene in the animated film, 13-year-old protagonist Mei, who’s started turning into a giant red panda whenever she gets emotional, sits down for a family ritual meant to control her inner panda. To begin the ritual, her grandmother and parents chant together. In the later part of the film, this chant returns in an entirely different context. The words aren’t subtitled, even in the various Chinese-language translations of the movie.

“What are they saying?” Mei asks Mr. Gao (voiced by James Hong), who’s leading the ritual. He tells her it doesn’t really matter — the ritual just requires participants to sing from the heart. “It doesn’t matter what,” Mr. Gao says. “I like Tony Bennett. But your grandma, she’s from old school.”

But director Domee Shi and producer Lindsey Collins couldn’t just have the cast sing any random thing — they had to develop their own chant for the movie. Polygon hears from the pair that it took a lot to make this ritual sound perfect.

“We were really inspired by Taoist chants that monks would do in Taoist temples,” Shi says. “At first, we wanted to see if there was an existing Taoist chant we could use. But then we thought, because this family is so specific, the situation is so unique — this family has this magical panda curse running through them! — we should come up with our own chant for it.”

Shi needed to ensure that a native speaker had been involved in the creation of the chant. She and her team reached Herman Wong (Hong Kong-based Asian-Pacific operations Director for Disney Character Voices International), the division responsible for translations and dubbing services. She says she doesn’t remember the exact words of the ritual herself, because it was a translation of a piece Wong helped them find.

“We knew it had to be in Cantonese, because the family is Cantonese,” she says. “He helped us translate a poem, a protection chant, with lyrics about watching over this girl, guiding her through her journey. He helped us create this rhyming chant.”

Image: Pixar Animation Studios

The next step was making sure the voice cast — including Sandra Oh and Ho-Wai Ching as Mei’s mother and grandmother — were comfortable with the poem and with making it sound like something ancient the family had passed down for centuries.

“We worked with a Cantonese dialect coach, Andy. We loved him,” Shi says. “He worked very closely with with each of the actors and actresses when it came time to record the chant.”

At the movie’s climax (spoilers ahead!), the family repeats the chant, this time to bring Mei’s mother’s panda under control after she hurts herself, raging against Mei’s adolescent rebellion. In the climactic final number, the chant winds up merging with Ludwig Göransson’s score and “Nobody Like U,” one of the songs siblings Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell’s wrote for The Turning of the Red’s heartthrob boy band 4*Town.

“It’s funny, we had in our head this idea of combining the chant at the end with the 4*Town music and the orchestration, and hoping it all came together,” Shi says. “But it was still a shot in the dark. It was a lot of, like, ‘I don’t know, maybe this will work?’”

“And then Ludwig was great,” Collins says. “He was like, ‘All right, so if the 4*Town song is in this key, let’s do this—’ He worked with us to make sure that rhythmically, we were doing what we needed to be doing so he could produce the remix. You know, he’s a pop record producer, in addition to being a composer. So he was able to pull the chant into his own system, along with the 4*Town song, and do this awesome remix where we were like, ‘Oh my God, it works!’ But I think it worked because he’s a magician. I’m not sure it worked because we’re magicians.”

The Turning of the RedCurrently streaming Disney Plus.