Pixar just released a new trailer for Turning Red, the very Toronto animated movie from Oscar-winning Bao director Domee Shi.
And with that we got news that another Canadian talent will be joining Sandra Oh in the voice cast: Never Have I Ever star Maitreyi Ramakrishnan.
Shi’s follow-up to the heartwarming Bao is about a Chinese-Canadian middle school girl named Mei Lee (Rosalie Chiang) who hits puberty and puffs up into a giant red panda during school at Lester B. Pearson. I’m going to guess that’s a shout out to Lester B. Pearson Collegiate in Malvern and not the grade school in North York. Shi has to be from Scarborough. The Bendale-style bungalow in both Bao and Turning Red are dead giveaways.
Or this could very well be a geographic and temporal hodgepodge of all things that a Toronto millennial holds dear. You get the sense from the trailer that the Lester B. Pearson in the movie is a Panda-hop, skip and a jump away from Chinatown. A TTC streetcar of old rolls down the street, while Mei Lei proudly wears a Tamagotchi, reads Tween Beat magazine (a riff on defunct Teen Beat) and goes home to those pink, furry toilet seat covers. Time is blurred between the early-aughts and now. We’re not going getting picky about accuracy – not when we’re in the middle of our aneurysm over seeing the CN Tower, Kensington Market and local talent like Shi, Oh and Ramakrishnan represented in a Pixar movie.
The latter plays Priya, a monotone South Asian best friend to Mei Lee, who sports a nose ring like the actor voicing her. Ramakrishnan, who is currently in Los Angeles preparing for Never Have I Ever season 3, has always said that working for Pixar has been a dream. She can pack it in now.
Turning Red opens in theatres in March.
