Has anyone watched Red Panda yet? I read a bunch of hullabaloo about it which caused me to seek out the trailer. To my old lady eyes, it looks predictable and "done before". Maybe it was just the trailer with it's cringey "Disney trying to be hip" thing that turned me off??
Is it actually good?
I watched it over the weekend and I felt like it was good but not great.
I personally don't care for the Disney/Pixar movies of the past decade trying to seem more contemporary in tone and feel whereas the more timeless feel of many of the older films, but perhaps others feel differently. They DID nail the teenage characters, which felt fairly accurate to how young teenagers behave and perceive the world.
It does do an excellent job of capturing and depicting in a child-friendly way what going through puberty feels like and how everything onsets so suddenly. I would have preferred if the panda piece was more metaphorical than it turned out to be (and in real life red pandas are racoon-sized, which distracted me the whole movie), but oh well.
The animation was beautiful, and it seems clear that Pixar is moving away from photo-realism into a somewhat more stylized direction, as seen in this film and Soul and Luca. Not bad, just different.
The "controversy" that the film has attracted about *gasp* depicting puberty onset accurately has been weird and baffling considering it's about something that every single adult has experienced and has been frequently depicted in film before this. I don't get it.
Anyway, long story short: it's a fine film that's not in the top tier but was clearly made with a lot of care and was focused on telling a very specific story that will resonate with a lot of people. It's not deserving of the vitriol that's being thrown its way at all.
