Turning Red’s funny, sweet, and empathetic portrait of cultural identity, gentle teen rebellion, and tetchy mother-daughter relations gets an extra boost from fake boy band 4*Town.

| Feb 9, 2024

This is a movie for anyone who has experienced the turmoil Mei experiences, which is to say just about everyone.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 3, 2022

I think it chickens out a little bit from telling [a story about puberty] to tell a more universal one... All of that is kind of fun, but slight.

| Mar 30, 2022

Like the best Pixars, you don’t need to have a kid to see it. It’s excellent entertainment for grown-up people, too.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Mar 19, 2022

I suspect tweens and teens are not the real targets anyway. The film often seems squarely, deliberately, aimed at their parents instead, offering them a gentle (if busy) reminder that they were young once too.

| Mar 17, 2022

Yes, there’s formula at work here. But who doesn’t enjoy an exquisitely manipulated cry?

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 16, 2022

This is a coming-of-age sensation where the supernatural and the mundane happily walk hand in hand, with each eye-popping surprise grounded in lifelike normality.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 14, 2022

Turning Red is a fizzing, squealing adolescent explosion of a movie that nails a fundamental truth about growing up.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 13, 2022

Theres a special kind of joy that comes from watching a film thats completely confident in its eccentricities. One made by a filmmaker who ... seemingly got the chance to execute their vision uncompromised.

| Original Score: A- | Mar 12, 2022

The problems are mostly with the script, which often requires Meilin to be almost irritatingly obnoxious...

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 12, 2022

It is funnier, cleverer and more honest than you might expect.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 12, 2022

If the perfect is the enemy of the good, it’s banished joyously in Turning Red.

| Mar 11, 2022

Turning Red is much like its pint-sized protagonist and goes proudly, loudly smaller, while still having the confidence and the smarts to poof at will into a bright red metaphor for the elation and confusion of coming-of-age.

| Mar 11, 2022

A charming film that will win friends and trigger worthwhile conversations. The right sort of feel-good.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 11, 2022

Switching up the familiar parental overbearing or understanding roles can have humanizing implications for both fathers and mothers. Moms, like dads, are only human, and dads are, in a different sense, no less human than moms.

| Mar 11, 2022

Turning Red is emblematic of the animation studio at its best, full of emotional intelligence and creative innovation, as likely to please children as it is adults.

| Original Score: A | Mar 11, 2022

Anyone with a soul will warm to Mei, a raunchy little rebel whose lust for life turns the term “red-blooded” on its head.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 11, 2022

The plotting, dialogue, and characters aren’t quite up to the studio’s standards. That’s more tribute to Pixar, and what we’ve come to expect from it, than criticism of “Turning Red.”

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Mar 11, 2022

Pixar tackles the topic of female puberty in this animated funhouse ride about a 13-year girl from Torontos Chinatown who turns into a giant red panda in this wise and wonderful metaphor for the roller coaster of messy adolescence.

| Mar 11, 2022

Turning Red is a charming coming-of-age story with lovely pops of imagination and a refreshing lack of queasiness when it comes to its themes of puberty and adolescent sexuality.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Mar 10, 2022