Television: “Degrassi” Movie: “Turning Red” (2022)

Long before the era of “Euphoria,” there was “Degrassi.” “Degrassi” is to teen television what Nicki Minaj is to female rap; they may not have been the first of their kind but those who came after them certainly followed in their footsteps. Starting out in the late seventies, “Degrassi” is a franchise that boasts five different iterations of teen ensemble cast shows. Its most popular iteration, “Degrassi: The Next Generation,” starred the likes of future rap megastar Drake and Nina Dobrev of “Vampire Diaries” fame. In its heyday, “Degrassi” lived up to its tagline of “It goes there,” with many of its storylines touching upon polarizing topics like teen pregnancy, LGBTQ+ issues, domestic violence, sexual assault, and abortion. In fact, a defining moment in “Degrassi,” and probably one of the most relevant due to the on-going mass shooting crisis in America, is of Drake’s character getting shot in the back by a fellow classmate in a school shooting and becoming paralyzed from the waist down as a result. While pushing an envelope that future teen dramas would go on to push even further, “Degrassi” never forgot that the characters were still high school kids, and thus performed a balancing act of having mature melodrama and highschool hijinks.

One of the more recent Pixar films, Disney’s “Turning Red’’ (2022) is about spunky Chinese-Canadian Meilin ‘Mei’ Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) who gains the ability to turn into a giant red panda due to a hereditary curse that affects the women in her family. The film quickly became the center of heavy online discussion when it exploded onto the scene. These discussions ranged from decrying the inappropriateness of the film’s focus on menstruation to claims that the film celebrates kids disobeying their parents to complaints about how ‘cringy’ the film was in its depiction of teenage girls. Much of the discourse around this film was very gendered and that becomes especially significant as “Turning Red,” is the first Pixar feature film to be solely directed by a woman. Domee Shi, the director in question, drew inspiration for “Turning Red’’ from animes like “Sailor Moon’’ and “My Neighbor Totoro,” other comingof-age works like “Wendy Wu: Homecoming Warrior,” real-life red pandas in zoos, and from her own adolescence. Besides Shi, “Turning Red’ had a lot of women working behind the camera, which means that this was made from the female-perspective. More specifically, it was made from the teenage girl perspective as “Turning Red’’ relishes in its display of unabashed girly tweenhood with Mei and her squad of besties obsessing over boybands, swooning over attractive boys, reading trashy vampire novels, beefing with the annoying boys in their class, realizing that maybe you should be more direct with your mom, and directly referencing menstruation by showing pads and tampons onscreen. It is for these reasons that “Turning Red’’ has found itself aggravating some audiences and why it is relevant to what is happening in Florida today. Right now, the federal and Florida government seem to be doing all they can to disempower the younger generations from the banning of books in Florida schools, to Arkansas rolling back laws that protected youth from being exploited, to Congress pushing for a ban on TikTok (used by many young people as a means of organizing politically and getting information on global events not being shown on TV news), to the announcement of a legislative bill in Florida that would ban any discussion of periods in elementary schools. “Turning Red” is a special coming of age tale that imagines an alternative reality that stands in deep and direct contrast to the one being lived in this very moment in time.