While television series like Euphoria and Gossip Girl revolve around its teenage characters backstabbing and betraying each other, despite their burgeoning friendships, Pixar's Turning Red showcases a considerably healthier and more accurate portrayal of friendships between teen girls. For Turning Red's cast and crew, this approach was a conscious effort to dispel toxic associations about teen friendships seen in other stories on the big and small screens.
In a press conference attended by CBR's Sam Stone, the main voice cast behind Turning Red assembled to share the behind-the-scenes secrets in making the hit Pixar movie. Soon the topic of Turning Red's positive portrayal of friendship between teenage girls arose. All the actors firmly dismissed toxic teenage friendships as not being the norm in their experiences and explained what it meant to them to portray healthier dynamics in Turning Red.
"It's important [to show] because those [toxic] tropes are wrong," observed actor Hyein Park, with the rest of the cast agreeing with her assessment. Park, who also works at Pixar as a story artist, noted that the friendship dynamic depicted in Turning Red sought to make the friendship between the film's characters feel more honest. To establish this realism, the story drew from director and screenwriter Domee Shi's experiences growing up in Toronto in the early 2000s.
All of the cast found toxic friendships being so commonplace in their teenage years not particularly true to their respective experiences in middle and high school. Park stated that the creative team wanted Turning Red's friendship to feel "authentic," revealing that Shi, specifically, hated the more toxic tropes of teen dynamics seen in television and film. The team then shared stories from their lives that reaffirmed the power of friendship that helped inform the rapport of Turning Red's characters.
"Watching television and films over the years, you just realize -- I don't know who sets this up -- that girls are like this," actor Sandra Oh added. "I don't think it's very true."
The cast felt that childhood friends would know each other particularly well, allowing them to be themselves around each other and celebrate being "goofy" together rather than treading so heavily in drama. In doing so, Turning Magic leans into its magical elements and makes for a positive all-around depiction of friendship with a supernatural twist.
Directed and co-written by Domee Shi, Turning Red premieres on March 11 on Disney+.