White Mormon Moms (and Others) Turn Red Over ‘Turning Red’

Have you seen the new Disney movie ‘Turning Red’? The movie features a Chinese Canadian family and stars a 13-year-old protagonist who tries to navigate puberty, friendship, and her relationship to her family – especially her mom – while battling a secret, hereditary quirk: when she gets emotional, she turns into a red panda. Although my teen years are well behind me, I thought the film perfectly captured so many of the feelings of adolescence: excitement, humiliation, awkwardness, and more.

And although I am Korean American rather than Chinese Canadian, I found so many cultural elements relatable as a second generation Asian immigrant: the tension between Western teen independence and Eastern emphasis on respecting elders, the genuine gratitude for the sacrifices your parents have made and the obligations you feel to contribute to your household, the emphasis on food – not just the making of it but remembering your loved ones’ favorite dishes and using flavors that celebrate your heritage – as a symbol of love. (If you need another example of this, I highly recommend the heartfelt memoir Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner.)

Unfortunately, many white critics and white Mormon (and Christian in general) moms appeared to miss all the meaningful parts of ‘Turning Red’ and instead voiced criticisms that revealed unreasonable, prudish cultural expectations for children and deeply ingrained double standards. (The best review I’ve seen yet is actually from an Asian American teenage girl, and it couldn’t be more different from the critical review examples I’ll discuss below.)

Part of the movie alludes indirectly to the beginning of the main character’s menstruation, with the mother using hilarious euphemisms like “Has the red peony bloomed?” and offering pads. This led many moms to comment online that the movie was “sick” or “indoctrinating” children. One need only browse the one-star Rotten Tomatoes audience reviews (which are much lower than the critics’ reviews) to see this sentiment echoed over and over again by self-described mothers seeking to protect their children. What exactly are they “protecting” their children from? A basic knowledge of feminine hygiene and reproductive health practices? A lack of shame about ordinary biological processes outside of their control?

One Christian mom complained that ‘Turning Red’ “misses the mark” and “is not relatable to boys or men,” reinforcing the harmful idea that female stories are for female audiences only while male stories are for everyone. Others called the movie “limiting” or “narrow” because it focused on an Asian girl. Nancy Wang Yuen, a sociology professor at Biola University, rightly identified such views as “the centering of whiteness” and continued, “It’s not like I could relate to Ratatouille… I didn’t even know Ratatouille was a dish. It’s not like we’re not exposed to things that don’t speak to us personally.”

Film critic Phil Villareal not only refers to ‘Turning Red’ as a “B-Team Pixar effort” but says it “can’t come close to…the emotional sensitivity” of ‘Up’ or ‘Inside Out’ – two excellent movies, to be sure, but ones that not-so-coincidentally feature white American stories. It is profoundly dehumanizing to be told that your stories are too foreign, too removed from common human experience for people who don’t look like you or eat the same food or speak the same language to possibly find anything valuable in them.

Others complained that the movie teaches children to rebel against their parents, including a now-viral post from an alleged Mormon mom. This criticism neglects the fact that distinguishing oneself as a unique and whole person apart from one’s parents is a crucial part of maturing and growing into a fully capable, independent adult. It’s highly hypocritical to defend the right of an eight-year-old to exercise agency and choose to be baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and then reject the right of an older, more mature child to assert their agency because it does not match up with exactly what the parents want. Agency isn’t agency if there is no option to choose the alternative.

I also highly doubt the same intolerance for “Soooooo much rebellion encouraged” as described in the Mormon mom post applies to other, whiter Disney classics such as ‘The Little Mermaid’, where the main character runs away from home, gives up her voice to a witch, and crosses over to a dangerous world she and nobody she knows has ever experienced before so she can become the permanent partner of a man she doesn’t know. It seems to me sneaking to a boy band concert, as the main character does in ‘Turning Red’, is much more tame in comparison.

‘Turning Red’ resonated with me but is an important film for representation that everyone regardless of gender or race should be able to enjoy. It brings up topics like menstruation, puberty, and adolescent independence in respectful and funny ways that can serve as a wonderful starting point for wholesome and rewarding conversations between parents and youth – if the parents allow them. In my view, the panic from Mormon and Christian mom corners of the Internet and others says more about white and male resistance to diverse stories and a harmfully puritanical approach to sex and relationships than anything else.