Turning Red

The final day of prep was spent booking taxis for our director and triple checking all the paperwork. Production Coordinators, I've learnt, are masters of ensuring the crew don't feel like headless chicken and are kept in the loop - misinformation is the enemy. If even one letter on a postcode is wrong on one document the entire day of filming is potentially in jeopardy. I did a lot of proof reading today and I'm confident we'll hit the ground running on Monday.

Because I've got my finger on the film pulse, I knew that Pixar's latest film Turning Red was coming out today to Disney's streaming platform. I was quite jazzed to see it, Rebecca too, we were big fans of the director's short film Bao so this would be a good time. And for the most part it kinda was. I was so sold on the opening 15 minutes, great energy, humour and characters, it even eluded towards going into very bold territories. But then it fell into a slump which it never quite got out of. There were still fun moments peppered in, but it was clear the film wasn't going to do it's best with it's own identity. I felt a similar way at the end of Encanto, and watcht the credits for both films seemingly confirmed my suspicious on what went pear shaped for both these films: the Story and Creative departments are enormous in these films. Whenever it feels like Turning Red offers up a unique direction, it gets reigned in to take the path well-trodden. I have a sneaking suspicion that the first few drafts if the story were infinitely more interesting than the final product, but the narrative by committee neutered this. It's almost like Disney's teams have a default formula for story which is so rigid that films must sacrifice their originally bin order to appeal to a mass market. Turning Red felt like the most egregious example of this to date. A delightful concept mangled into something palettable... And ironically it's all the blander for it.