Getting nominated for an Oscar is old hat for Pixar, but for director Domee Shi, whose coming-of-age Turning Red was her first feature for the studio (she’d previously directed the short, Bao, about a mother raising a dumpling as a son), getting nominated was a gift. Her first true at bat netted her a spot on the shortlist for Hollywood’s biggest award.
Speaking with Deadline, Shi discussed not only what being nominated meant for her, but how seeing Everything Everywhere All At Once inspired to take her ideas even further and try to push Pixar in bold new directions.
Turning Red, as any Pixarhead with a Disney+ subscription knows, tells the story of 13-year-old Mei Lee as she begins to enter into adolescence. With her burgeoning teenage years comes a family curse, that of turning into a comically huge red panda and bumbling her way through her world of duty to her family and trying to spread her wings with her friends. It was a movie that earned some social criticism with a host of adults thinking that kids, especially girls, shouldn’t be taught that they end up going through puberty (like every other human being on the planet earth). Nevertheless, the story won big with the Academy and garnered a nomination for the new director.
But there was another movie that got nominated this year, the popular multiversal-spanning Everything Everywhere All At Once by the Daniels, that also inspired the director. Seeing another Asian American themed property go so big while staying true to its familial roots, she felt inspired for her next project: “All I can really say about it is it’ll be very me and will be very much inspired by my background, my culture, and the themes and ideas that I love talking about… I think with movies like ours and Everything Everywhere All at Once, it’s just really cool and really important to see more of these stories in the media.”
The real issue will be to see if Shi takes home the golden statuette which will garner her much more negotiating power with a studio that’s turned increasingly to sequels (with 5 Toy Story movies and 3 Cars films to date) in an industry that’s grown increasingly insular and non-experimental on the studio side as opposed to the indie market. Still, for as much criticism as it received, Turning Red got a lot more praise and managed to tell a story that was for everybody despite being centered on what on paper might read as a narrow segment. It’s worth hoping that Pixar joins the next journey after Turning Red that Domee Shi wants to go on.
Turning Red is streaming on Disney+.
Source: Deadline