How Turning Red Opens the Door for More Asian Representation at Pixar

The relationship between Mei and her mom is imbued with an emotional complexity that was important for Shi to convey.

“[Our story is] different from a lot of Western stories, where it’s more black and white,” Shi explains. “In those stories, the parent is this militant obstacle from the very beginning and the kid wants to break free and be rebellious and just wants to emancipate themselves from their parents. But Mei, like a lot of us, truly loves her mom. She truly wants to honor her family. But her friends are pulling her away, the red panda is pulling her away. And she doesn’t want that, so it’s more of a struggle for her.”

To illustrate Mei’s explosive inner-struggle, Shi and the artists at Pixar employed an anime-inspired art style, with dramatic zooms, exaggerated poses, and poppy flourishes that heighten the emotion. “I grew up watching so much anime and manga,” Shi says. “Disney-Pixar and anime are the two foundations of me, and they’ve inspired and influenced me so much as an artist and filmmaker. So it felt natural that we would lean into that style when we started making this movie. It also felt like the best way to really make the audience feel what Mei is feeling at any given moment. Anime is just so colorful and expressive, and it really exaggerates everything on screen. I’ve always loved that, and I’ve always wanted to see what that would look like in 3D.”

There was a particularly quirky, glittery tone to the early aughts, when teenage pop stars and boy bands draped in unconscionably shiny outfits ruled the airwaves. To capture the vibe of the time, the team at Pixar hired Finneas and Billie Eilish to write original songs for 4*Town, the movie’s fictional boy band. While Billie quite literally wasn’t alive at the height of the TRL era, and Finneas was just a toddler, the sibling pop duo turned out to be a perfect fit for the film.

“The reason we reached out to them was we felt like they could write lyrics that could speak to Mei and her friends and that generation of teens,” Shi says. “They could make the songs feel like the boys were singing directly to the girls. They had that personal experience.”

Producer Lindsey Collins adds that Billie and Finneas took the gig seriously and immersed themselves in the music of the time. “Listening to them talk about how they came up with the lyrics…they went deep,” Collins says. “They researched what made those lyrics so great. I think Finneas, as a producer, takes that really seriously, tapping into what the sound was, what the structure of those songs were.”