BEFORE: We drove out to Long Island today, my wife's car needed an oil change and also there were some factory recalls on some parts, I guess and they needed to be replaced - not a car guy, so I don't get how that stuff really works. (Or oil changes, for that matter.). The dealer gave her a loaner car so we could drive to get some lunch while they worked, so we went to the mall nearby and had lunch at the Cheesecake Factory. Before that, we walked around the mall and there was a real, open, working FYE store, that sold DVDs and Blu-Rays! All I saw was the bargain bin at first, and that made sense, it's just been a long time since I saw ANY physical media on sale in a store. There's still a market for DVDs! I guess the store couldn't survive on just selling t-shirts and Funko Pop figures. Then we walked by the food court, and it was packed! No really great restaurants, just a ramen place and a chinese food place, some pizza. What was weird was seeing so many people out in the open, amassed together, sharing the same space, so I guess COVID is really over. Or it's Long Island, and people just didn't care, it's a very red-state part of New York, after all.
James Hong carries over from "Everything Everywhere All at Once", and if you want to talk about a guy with a lot of screen credits, you've got to talk about Hong. He's got over 450 credits in the IMDB, and that may or may not be a record, but his resume stretches back to the 1950s! He was born in 1929, so he's...94 years old and still making movies, some of his credits are recent, like the three movies here in my January chain. He was in "Chinatown" (1974), "Airplane" (1980), "Blade Runner" (1982) and the ORIGINAL Godzilla movie, the one from 1956! He's famous for an episode of "Seinfeld", but his TV resumé includes "Perry Mason", a bunch of Westerns and BOTH incarnations of "Hawaii Five-O"! "Kung Fu Panda", "R.I.P.D.", "Scooby-Doo", "Charmed", "Friends", "Mulan", "Dynasty", "Dragnet", you name it, he's been in it!
THE PLOT: A 13-year-old girl named Meilin turns into a giant red panda whenever she gets too excited.
AFTER: So yeah, this movie came to Disney Plus last March, and I've been avoiding it... or should I say, it's been really difficult to link to it, and it took me 10 months. I can't tell any more, does it matter? I think I worked a screening of it some time last year at the theater, and I peeked my head in a couple times and saw a few scenes, but naturally they didn't make much sense, because they were out of context. But I read a few articles about the film, and of course people raved about it, because it's got a female lead character, and it deals with issues of parenting, teen insecurity, and the whole panda thing's a giant metaphor for puberty, right?
Well, yes and no, I suppose. I mean, it's a RED panda, and it comes from an ancient Chinese family CURSE, and the solution to get rid of it is to perform a ritual under a red moon, which is also called a BLOOD moon. See what I mean? They're dancing all around this whole "becoming a woman" thing that's associated with puberty and menstruation. Which as teens we're told is no big deal, but the adults make a really big deal out of telling teens that it's no big deal. More on that in a bit, but let's deal with the giant panda in the room.
Meilin lives in Toronto with her parents, and she's very devoted to helping them run the biggest Chinese temple in town, which is traditional but not so traditional, because it honors their male AND FEMALE ancestors, rather than the... um, Chinese gods? I don't know how Buddhism works, either. But what do most Chinese temples honor? Was this a narrative cop-out or a concession, or an attempt to not piss off the Christians or evangelicals in the audience? I bet a kid wouldn't even notice this. Anyway, Meilin's mother is very controlling (you know, because she's Asian) and over-protective, and clearly isn't ready to see her daughter grow up.
Sure, she MEANT to tell Meilin about the family curse, but she "thought she'd have more time". More likely, she avoided this because it would have been an admission that her daughter is ready to be a young adult, and she couldn't handle that. Her overprotective behavior also manages to embarrass her daughter, again and again. It's one thing to bring your daughter's lunchbox to school if she forgot it, but bringing her maxipads and making a big show of it, that's just not cool. What is it about parents that they forget how to be subtle about things? Or are parents going to embarrass their kids no matter what they do, is this just built into the situation? (Another thing I don't really understand, because I don't have a kid.)
Meilin finds out, after having a stressful nightmare, that any strong emotion will turn her into a giant panda (not the cute black and white kind, which are bears, but the red Chinese kind, which I think is from the raccoon family). Naturally she freaks out, but freaking out is only going to keep her in the panda state, so she's got to learn to relax in order to turn human again. This would only be a problem if she's at a stage in her life when she's moody and irritable thanks to hormones, right? The film uses the term "excited" to describe a lot of different emotional states, one of which comes from after thinking of herself embraced by an older boy, but of course you can't say "horny" in a Disney film for kids. Meilin also gets into the panda state when she sees something that's too cute, or she gets hit by a dodgeball, or she thinks about her favorite boy band coming to town - so, she's pretty much screwed, she's going to be a panda all the time.
Fortunately she finds that thinking of her closest friends, knowing they support her no matter what, calms her down enough to transform back. But that's kind of an emotional crutch, right? She should learn to embrace her panda side and be proud of it, and not so eager to turn back, it's something that makes her unique and special, especially since the rest of the women in her family have gone through the ritual and put their panda spirits into red gems that hold them in captivity. Eventually, the movie gets there when she's found out at school, and all the other kids want to see the panda, touch the panda, ride the panda. Wow, that was an interesting turn, she went from nerdy and unpopular to the biggest conversation piece, in a good way (?). So of course she and her friends try to monetize this so they can get concert tickets.
Meilin can't get her parents on board to let her see 4*Town, so naturally she decides to defy them and sneak out to raise money for that last ticket. Nothing good can come from that, which actually is an OK message to send out to the kids. But then blaming her friends for the scheme that she came up with, not cool. Then the ritual and the boy-band concert are set for the same night, so you just know there's going to be a conflict/showdown there.
The whole boy-band / beatboxing / kid slang is really horrible here - these kids don't talk the way real kids talk, I'll bet, they talk the way adults THINK that real kids talk, which is different. Kids don't say "You da bomb!" any more, that was out like 10 years ago. Maybe the script was written 10 years ago? Or kid slang changed more quickly than some screenwriter thought? Or do they still say "You da bomb!" up in Canada? I doubt it. Anyway, I cringed every time I heard these four girls talk, because the adults made them talk so stupidly - and one was ALWAYS shouting, which was very annoying. Also, the kids were like 80% GIANT TEETH, and I noticed that in just about every scene, the character design was very distracting. Once you see that, you can't unsee it.
So yeah, the period thing. Do we ever find out if Meilin really DID get her period at the same time? Her mother assumed she did, and brought her the pads, but that was before her mother knew it was the panda thing. Do the two go hand-in-hand? The whole "honey, you're becoming a woman" thing is bothersome to me, because as I said before, the parents also say AT THE SAME TIME that it's natural and no big deal. Well, does it mean something, or doesn't it? As time goes on and humans become more educated some things change, but others don't. We still think of the heart as the emotional center of the body, but it's not, it's just an organ that pumps blood and keeps us alive - emotions are in the brain, not the heart, but you don't see brain-shaped boxes of candy on Valentine's Day, do you? We still say "Bless you" after somebody sneezes, but we don't still believe that a person's soul leaves their body when they sneeze. If menstruation is a purely natural process, it should be treated that way, without the emotional weight and meaning that people have added to it. At the basic level, it's neither a blessing NOR a curse, it's just a thing that happens. Much like how a Sweet Sixteen or a Quinceañera get celebrated in cultures, but those birthdays are just dates on the calendar, but culture has then tacked on an extra meaning to those birthdays, for reasons.
It would be ridiculous if there were a special meaning attached to a young man's first, umm, well you know, ejaculation, so why does the first period get such special attention? It doesn't seem fair, but then, what do I know?
Also starring the voices of Rosalie Chiang, Sandra Oh (last heard in "Raya and the Last Dragon"), Ava Morse (last heard in "Ron's Gone Wrong"), Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, Hyein Park, Orion Lee (last seen in "Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi"), Wai Ching Ho (last seen in "Set It Up"), Tristan Allerick Chen, Lori Tan Chinn, Mia Tagano, Sherry Cola, Lillian Lim, Jordan Fisher, Finneas O'Connell (last seen in "Bad Teacher"), Topher Ngo, Grayson Villanueva, Josh Levi, Sasha Roiz (last seen in "Man of the Year"), Addie Chandler, Lily Sanfelippo, Freya Fox (also carrying over from "Everything Everywhere All at Once")
RATING: 4 out of 10 dumplings (which seems to be all they eat in this film, because, you know, Asians...)
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