Domee Shi recounts the emotional words of her mother — the sentence she heard upon each visit home after moving out: Oh, Domee, I wish I could put you back in my stomach so I knew exactly where you were at all times.
“I always thought that was a such a sweet but very creepy thing to say to your daughter,” Shi, laughing warmly, says during a recent Zoom call. “I wanted to kind of understand where that feeling came from.”
As an artist and filmmaker, Shi weighed the creative possibilities of those words until a story sprung to life. Her mother’s phrase helped inspire Shi’s 2018 Oscar-winning animated short “Bao,” in which an empty-nest mother eats her allegorical dumpling of a son rather than let him go.
That film’s success directly fueled Shi’s new follow-up — a more complex tale also featuring a protective mother of Chinese descent, as she navigates her relationship with a strong daughter at the onset of puberty. “Turning Red,” which was just released on Disney Plus, is not only the first Pixar film to be solo-directed by a woman. It also continues Pixar’s growth with personal stories exploring matrilineal lines — even within Disney, which has long employed animated parental death as narrative device.
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“We’ve always tried to make sure our films are personal,” Pixar chief Pete Docter says. “We’ve made other films centered around female characters, like ‘Brave’ and ‘Inside Out,’ but it’s been great to really launch that even further with Domee and ‘Turning Red.’ ”
Other mother characters have emerged as vitally present in the past decade in such Pixar hits as “Coco,” as well as Disney’s “Encanto,” which is up for three Academy Awards at this month’s Oscars ceremony.
Since the dawn of Disney animation, though, stretching back more than eight decades, parents have routinely been jettisoned or unaccounted for — from such early Disney classics as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” to more modern hits such as “Frozen.” And sometimes, the death of the mother happens traumatically on screen, such as in Disney’s “Bambi” and Pixar’s “Finding Nemo.” In the Tragic Kingdom, orphans abound.
The reasons for creating a narrative that disappears parents can include engendering empathy, as well as setting a young hero off on a journey of self-discovery — a frequent arc that includes Disney’s “Lion King” releases and Pixar’s “The Good Dinosaur.”
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Countering that trend at Pixar specifically, however, vivid mother characters have appeared in such stories as “Luca,” “Soul” and “The Incredibles” films. And two trailblazing female filmmakers in the studio’s past decade — Brenda Chapman and Shi — have particularly plumbed the complexities of mother-daughter relationships.
Chapman, the first woman to co-direct a Pixar feature, told The Washington Post in 2013 that she wrote the Oscar-winning picture “Brave” as “a love letter” to her daughter. The film centers largely on the tug-of-war between the independent spirit of medieval teen archer Merida and the expectations from her royal Scottish Highlands family. She and her mother, Queen Elinor, struggle to understand each other even as they race against the clock after Merida’s impetuous wish turns mom into a bear.
For “Turning Red,” Shi mined her own life for a story set in early-aughts Toronto, as 13-year-old Meilin “Mei” Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) rebels against the hovering control of her mother, Ming (Sandra Oh). The supernatural secret in this Chinese-Canadian family, though, is that Mei suddenly begins turning into a giant red panda when her emotions are inflamed.
“I was her,” says Shi, who is in her early 30s. “I was Mei when I was 13 — I was this dorky, confident, obsessive girl who thought she had her life under control. I was her mom’s little perfect daughter and then one day woke up, and everything changed: my body, my emotions, my relationship with my mom — I was fighting with her every day.”
Thanks to Shi’s eye for detail, “Turning Red” resists easy caricatures of parent-child squabbles, instead finding emotionally true notes that feel rooted in the specificity of experience. “Making this movie is just me wanting me to go back and understand what was going on at that time,” says Shi, who was born in China before her family moved to Canada when she was a toddler. “Not just from my own perspective, but my mom’s, too — and just kind of look at growing up and puberty through a fun, weird, awkward lens and laugh at it, but also celebrate it.”
The family dynamics grow more complex as other female relatives enter the picture bearing their own family secrets — while Mei’s father stays attentively present but mostly silent.
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Ming, the grandmother and the aunties in this movie are “directly inspired by the strong women in my life who raised me,” says Shi, who was a storyboard artist on “Inside Out” before Docter began encouraging her personal stories. (Her pitch for “Bao,” he says, stood out “as completely original and kind of shocking.”)
Chiang appreciates the depth of depicting a deep family tree in this tale. “Turning Red,” she says, “shows how history repeats itself in the generations.”
Oh, whose parents emigrated to Canada from South Korea, says she was drawn to the project’s rendering of matrilineal relationships, especially within an Asian culture. “I think for those who went through it as children, it’s like trying to balance the level of love and loyalty that we have to our parents and our culture, and the stress that it can put kids under to try to find themselves as well,” says Oh, noting that even her choice to pursue acting meant overcoming hurdles within her family.
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Oh says “Turning Red” can be appreciated from the mother’s perspective, too. “During that beginning time when hormones are racing and [adolescents] become these crazy animals, you don’t know what to do with them and you don’t understand why they’re not listening to you,” says the “Killing Eve” actress, adding: “That’s hopefully what we can see a little flavor with, with Ming, is that difficulty that they both have of not wanting to lose the connection and the love, but understanding that that has to change.”
For Shi, who co-wrote “Turning Red” with Julia Cho, even following her animation dreams brought its own sense of internal concern over parent-child separation.
“I definitely felt that guilt when I first moved out to California when I got the job at Pixar,” says Shi of her relocation from Canada to the studio’s Emeryville campus. “I was the furthest I’d ever lived away from my parents. As an only child, I just felt: Oh no, I’m leaving them and I feel really bad. But I also really, really need this — I need to leave.”
Making “Bao,” she says, was her creative way of “processing my own feelings of leaving the nest, yet even after her triumphant eight-minute short, “I felt like I barely scratched the surface.”
“So when I was given the opportunity to direct a feature film, I was like: All right, here we go! Mother-daughter relationship — let’s dive in and analyze it from every angle.”
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