Turning Red Review: Celebrating Fandom and Letting Teenage Girls Be Weird

Turning Red is a newly released Pixar animated film about a teenage girl's unconventional coming of age. It follows her struggle to balance the changes that come with adolescence, her passions and friendships, and honoring the obligations she has to her family- all with a supernatural twist. The film was ultimately a touching insight into how inter-generational trauma can be broken with understanding and acceptance, a theme with which many young people, but especially young people of colour, will deeply resonate. Don't be mistaken though: this is still a Pixar film, so it is just as lighthearted and full of adventure as it is moving.

Since its release, it has received some negative attention from critics, in and among the praise. The criticism included discomfort surrounding the mere mentioning of sanitary pads and periods. The main gripe from those who raised this critique, is that menstruation is an inappropriate topic for children around the same age as the characters in the film. While unsurprising given that stigma around periods is still rampant, especially in more conservative spaces, it can hardly be considered inappropriate when there are plenty of children who start their periods well before their adolescence, some as young as eight or nine years old. 

The inclusion of scenes discussing menstruation, may indeed be not just an entirely appropriate inclusion, but perhaps most importantly, a validating one for those children. For parents, it is easy to say to your child that their experience of pre-adolescence is normal, but the representation within media and film can help parents normalize and begin the discussion with their children.

Another gripe with the film is to do with the protagonist's obsession with a boyband; some disparaged it as not being a universal enough experience, that was an overly 'girly' and trivial plot point. In defense of this it could be pointed out that the interests of teenage girls have long been dismissed as immature, and how the obsessive nature of these interests have been mocked constantly. But the defense I'll make here instead is much simpler: so what? The underlying sexism in equating anything remotely feminine with weakness aside, adolescence is painful enough for most teenagers regardless of gender. 'Girls will be girls' is enough of a reason to let young girls celebrate their interests and not be shamed for them.

That is the grace that Turning Red grants to its audience, and what makes it a fun, emotional and relatable film.