Turning Red has all the elements that make an animated movie a Pixar movie, and while it continues some of the studio’s biggest traditions, it also continues a major, new tradition break. Although there are now different animation studios that bring a variety of stories to the big screen every year, Pixar continues to be the biggest name in the world of animation as well as a favorite of the audience. Pixar fans are treated to at least one movie per year, and 2022 will bring two very different stories, beginning with Turning Red.
Directed by Domee Shi, Turning Red takes viewers to Toronto to meet Meilin “Mei” Lee (Rosalie Chiang), a confident and dorky 13-year-old Chinese-Canadian student who one day discovers that, whenever she gets too excited or stressed, she turns into a giant red panda, but she can turn back if she becomes calm and learns to control her emotions. This “quirk” is linked to her ancestors, who have a shared history with the species as a family curse, but the curse can be contained by performing a special ritual on one specific night. Unfortunately for Mei, that night coincides with a concert of her favorite boy band, 4*Town, and if that wasn’t enough, Mei also has to deal with her overbearing mother, Ming (Sandra Oh), who only makes Mei’s problems even bigger.
Turning Red follows some of the most notable Pixar traditions, such as the appearance of the Pizza Planet truck, references to other Pixar movies, “A113” hidden somewhere, and an Easter egg teasing the following movie (in this case, Lightyear), but it also breaks one of the studio’s most famous traditions: having a character voiced by John Ratzenberger. The “Ratzenberger tradition” began with Toy Story, where he voiced Hamm and later P.T. Flea in A Bug’s Life, and since then, he had voiced at least one character in each Pixar movie as he started to be considered a “good luck charm” for the studio – however, this tradition has been broken in recent years.
The last time John Ratzenberger voiced a character in a Pixar movie, it was construction worker Fennwick in Onward, and the tradition went on a different route in Soul, where instead of voicing a character, there was one who looked like him, but it was a background character, so it’s easy to miss. Ratzenberger was absent from Luca, and he’s not featured in Turning Red either. A reason for Ratzenberger’s absence from recent Pixar movies hasn’t been given, so it’s all speculation for now. When confirming Ratzenberger isn’t in Luca, director Enrico Casarosa joked about starting a new tradition of putting Peter Sohn’s voice in every movie, though there might be some truth to that after all. Pixar movies have become more culturally aware in recent years, and with that come many changes, so maybe it was time to leave some traditions behind in favor of more diversity.
It’s also possible that Ratzenberger hasn’t been able to lend his voice to characters in the latest Pixar movies due to commitment to other projects or due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has changed the way some movies are made. It’s unknown if John Ratzenberger will be in Lightyear (either voicing a character or having one designed after him), but his absence in Turning Red makes that unlikely.
