What Turning Red’s panda really means in the mom-daughter relationship 

In the lead up to the release of Pixar’s Turning Red, director Domee Shi brought up a question she’d heard repeatedly about her animated short BaoA tale of a Chinese woman raising her child as a dumpling. “A lot of people kept asking me: ‘Why is Bao a boy? Why is this little dumpling a boy?’” Shi told reporters in a presentation. “And I was like, ‘Oh, because I only had eight minutes to tell this story. For a mother/daughter story, I’d need an entire feature film to unpack that.’”

Her theatrical debut was a success. It’s time to turn redShi was finally able to unpack. The movie centers on 13-year-old Meilin “Mei” Lee (Rosalie Chung), a spunky middle-school student, and her stern mother, Ming (Sandra Oh). They are close but Ming demands perfection from Mei as she is growing in her individuality. She struggles to reconcile her growing self-confidence with family loyalties as she enters adolescence. All of this is exacerbated when Mei wakes up one morning and discovers that she now turns into a giant red panda when she’s overcome with emotion — a quirk all the women in her family share. Mei wonders if it is really necessary to kill her panda.

[Ed. note: This article contains major spoilers for the end of Turning Red.]

Image: Pixar

Mei was told by her mother to keep her panda secret from the rest of the world. Mei’s mother and other female relatives view their pandas with shame. After their rituals, they hide it in jewelry that they still wear. Mei, regardless of the stories they share about their family’s legacy, finds her peers believe her red panda to be cute, interesting, and cool. In fact, she’s able to make money by letting people see her in panda mode, and take pictures with her. It isn’t long before she starts to like the red-panda version of herself. She knows she isn’t supposed to, and much of the movie revolves around Mei’s internal struggle over being true to herself vs. trying to please her family. She decides to end the film. Notto keep her panda locked up, even though her mother knows it will cause a change in her relationship.

Shi spends most of the film examining the relationships between Mei, her mother and herself. Their main source of conflict is the panda, which ultimately determines their future together for good and bad. So what is the meaning of the panda? The movie never directly answers that, but the metaphor subtly shapes the movie’s ending, depending on how you choose to read it. The metaphor is multifaceted and a powerful symbol for the communication between mothers and daughters, regardless of its meaning.

Puberty is the panda

Image: Pixar

It is obvious that puberty symbolizes the panda. Ming mistakes Mei’s first transformation for her first period, and the sheer awkwardness Mei feels while trying to hide her bright red secret translates to the sheer awkwardness many girls feel about getting their first period. Mei’s physical transformation happens suddenly, and she has to get used to navigating the big emotions that trigger it. When the panda manifests there is no hiding it. It’s a great representation for growing up and the feeling that many teenagers feel when their bodies change for all to see.

If the panda is puberty and growing up, then it’s also something Ming didn’t prepare Mei for. That’s a common trope seen across cultures, stemming from a generational gap, where a well-meaning parent doesn’t want to expose their child to the pain and discomfort of adulthood, and would prefer if they were kids for just a little longer. Peggy Hill continues the sex conversation with Bobby in King of the Hill to Lady Bridgerton not informing Daphne about the mechanics of baby-making before she gets married, the trope transcends time and place, and often reflects creators’ real-life experiences.

Image: Pixar

However, children often reach adulthood earlier than their parents anticipate. In this specific example, it falls on Ming to explain the machinations of growing up to Mei, particularly since the male members of the family don’t share the same condition. It reflects how society sees the most drastic changes occurring in the female body differently to the male. Mai’s embarrassment and confusion about her transformations helps emphasize the specific burden society places on young women as their bodies change, and the world suddenly starts to see and treat them differently.

Even the double-standard takes on a metatextual flavour: Baymax was so popular that no one saw it. Big Hero 6 tells Hiro that his body is going through changes, but Mei’s period misunderstanding drew a lot of ire from some viewers, particularly parents who felt the topic was inappropriate for children. Ming is initially influenced by societal attitudes towards female puberty and fails to tell Mei the details of her changing body. Ming’s discomfort isn’t solely her fault — society has ingrained into her that certain topics remain taboo. If the panda is puberty, Mei is finally realizing how other people perceive her body — and she also realizes that it doesn’t have to be that way. The end of the film, then, turns into Mei triumphantly reclaiming her body and her puberty — lampshaded a bit at the end when she tells her mom “My panda, my choice!” In spite of what her mother and grandmother were taught, and what they tried to teach her, Mei has realized there is no inherent shame in existing in a body.

Tradition and culture are the core values of the panda

Image: Pixar

The panda transformations given to women specifically are a part of Mei’s family, and have been for centuries. They used to celebrate their pandas back in China. But, as Ming explained, once the family immigrated from China to Canada the blessing was something that they kept secret. Mei’s family still celebrates their Chinese heritage through the food they eat and the temple they maintain. But it is telling that the specific moment the panda became an “inconvenience,” as Ming calls it, is when the Lees left their country of origin.

Ming doesn’t go into detail about why the panda became something the family had to hide, but it could be that it was such a jarringly different quirk from their new culture that they thought it would be best to keep it away from targeting eyes. Children of immigrant families will often recognize that their grandparents or parents have taken parts of them and packaged them up to help them adapt into another culture. These talismans, which the Lee women are carrying, have a very poignant meaning. They could be hidden somewhere so that they can never be damaged or stolen. Instead, each woman keeps hers on her person — a reminder, no matter how small, of the culture she once came from.

Additionally, Ming says the family’s panda transformations were originally designed to help them in a time of strife and war. This is Mei’s surprising discovery about her family history. Often, there are painful aspects about a family’s past that go untold to younger generations, in order to save them from trauma. When Mei learns about the pandas’ origins, her feeling of betrayal is evident. That response could be read not just as her frustration about being uninformed and unprepared for her own panda transformation, but also at her sadness over being separated from her family’s culture, and her reasonable feeling that she hasn’t been trusted with important truths.

Image: Pixar

Mei spends a lot of the movie struggling between loyalty to her family and culture, and her own newfound sense of self, which comes with an intense surprise interest in boys and a deep commitment to the pop culture she loves, particularly the boy band 4*Town. She hides her fandom from her mother, who openly disapproves of Mei’s friends. She also turns her back on those friends when they need her to stand up for them, because she’s afraid of offending her mother. Mei’s internal conflict largely stems between trying to live in two different worlds, as she starts to understand how deep and meaningful her relationships outside of her family have become. This can cause tension in immigrant kids, Shi said to Polygon.

“That moment where the most important relationship in our life shifts from our family to people outside of our family… that’s a big moment,” she says. “That’s a big coming-of-age moment that is especially tricky and messy in immigrant families, because family is so important in a lot of these cultures, and [prioritizing people outside the family] should not be happening.”

The solution, however, isn’t for Mei to entirely choose between her family and her friends. Instead, she finds harmony when she discovers her connection with her cultural heritage. As a kid born and raised in Toronto, Mei’s culture isn’t just Chinese, it’s Chinese-Canadian. First- and second-generation immigrant children create a new culture, combining elements from multiple cultures. Nothing exemplifies this cultural fusion more than the movie’s climax, where the family’s mystical panda chant combines with an infectiously catchy 4*Town pop song.

By the end of the movie, Mei has connected with a culture — but not the one her mother and grandmother came from. She was actually born in another world and although her relationship is evolving with her mother, she will continue to bring certain aspects of her culture and her family into her teens in the early 2000s.

Panda means self-expression of emotions

Image: Pixar

Mei’s strong emotions overwhelm Mei and the panda is manifested. At first, this is a burden, and she tries to suppress her powerful feelings instead of embracing them — just like all the women in her family. She eventually realizes her family sees the panda in a negative light, but Mei is able to find great joy from it. Indulging in those big emotions that the panda springs from isn’t the burden she’s been told it is, and it doesn’t make her peers look down on her. In fact, they support her feelings and she realizes that letting her friends see her full self — even the bad, ugly, and cringy sides — is not a weakness.

It’s a difference in cultures at play. Asian cultures often value community over individuality, and often prioritize the concept of saving face, the general cultural idea of maintaining dignity and control in public in order to gain other people’s respect. Members of the Asian diaspora may find this ideal conflicting with Western culture’s focus on individualism and vigorous self-expression. If compared to Western stereotypes of parents who are openly supportive and affectionate, the parenting styles and attitudes that Asian immigrants adopt can be quite stern.

Image: Pixar

Polygon hears Shi say that she worked hard to make sure this happened. It’s time to turn red avoided the “Tiger Mom” trope — a stereotype about East Asian, particularly Chinese, parents that equates high expectations for their children with unfeeling, stern parenting. Shi says that this stereotype, as damaging as it is, comes from an extremely superficial place of truth. For her, the key was to make sure it wasn’t one-note, and that there was a clear reason behind Ming’s behavior.

“You’ll talk to any first-generation Asian kids … they do have that experience with it, but [stories about Tiger moms] never explore Why?Parents are like that. And a lot of the time, it’s from [the creators’] own past experiences,” Shi says. “I know, for my parents, they grew up in China, they dealt with a lot of crazy stuff that makes them the way they are. There are reasons why parents act this way.”

One of the particularly striking things about this interpretation is that even though Ming and Mei’s older family members eventually understand her feelings about her panda, they still chose to keep theirs locked away. They aren’t ready for her newfound mode of emotional expression, which makes sense, considering everything they’ve gone through themselves, and everything they’ve been taught. The women they are now, as adults, do not have the same overwhelming feelings Mei experienced when she was 13. It is possible to support Mei’s decisions and not follow her lead, which can feel both realistically poignant and real.

These are all things that the panda does not do, but they can be any of them.

Image: Pixar

While we can speculate all that is possible about the meaning of the panda, Shi has boiled the matter down to one simple sentence.

“The red panda is a metaphor not just for puberty, but also what we inherit from our moms, and how we deal with the things that we inherit from them,” she tells Polygon.

That’s enough of a broad, all-encompassing statement to cover all these interpretations at once, even if it doesn’t focus in on any of them specifically. And that’s reasonable, considering the difficulty of separating any one aspect of Mei’s experience from the others. The way Ming teaches Mei about the changes to her body and the way she emotes is intrinsically tied to Ming’s own cultural roots, just as the way Mei processes those critical changes will be shaped by her own multicultural identity.

The panda gives all these complicated themes a tangible form — and a fluffy, cute, accessible one at that. Ming and Mei may not be able to talk about the panda, but they should. It is an inheritance, passed from mother to child, and it changes subtly with each generation. Mei and Ming experience the panda in different ways. Each woman must determine if they want to keep it or give it up. Mei is shown hugging her panda at the end, but her mother chooses to keep it hidden. Both of these are good decisions. The important thing is that they’ve finally talked about it. Their relationship won’t be the same, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t strong.