Torn about Turning Red

It's funny, I can't really make up my mind about Pixar's latest film Turning Red. My ambivalence started even before it aired. Some odd decisions were made about its release which made me feel a mixture of pity for the Pixar people (for being shackled to Disney, who do not always seem to have the studio's best interest at heart) and irritation. The trailers, unlike the ones for Onward and Soul, were pretty good: I liked the protagonist Meilin's spunk, and the red panda she intermittently turns into is cute. At the same time, as someone who usually enjoys Disney Animation films more than Pixar ones, I have a latent resentment towards Pixar, as the studio that know-it-all animation experts often compare favourably to Disney's own more "sentimental" fare. I go into a Disney film wanting to enjoy it. I go into a Pixar film expecting to enjoy it, but if I don't, I'm not altogether sorry. What really puts me off is any hint of smugness or moral superiority – and the vibes I was getting from the latest Pixar project weren't quite exempt from that.

All the same, the film apparently tackled female puberty and its problems, and unlike many male YouTube reviewers I have first-hand experiences of this (albeit from the distant past). Surely, I thought, I would find the film more relatable than some of them did. When I sat down to watch it – in something of a hurry, as I had to finish it and my washing in time for the Swedish final heat for Eurovision the same evening – I was optimistic.

I mention my hurry, because I think I would have appreciated Turning Red more if it had been the evening's main event, which I could then have enjoyed while relaxing with a glass of wine. As it was, the sometimes hectic and jumbled feel of the film was heightened by the circumstances. I still liked it. The animation's gorgeous, the setting (Toronto in the early 2000s, with Meilin being part of a well-established Asian minority) felt different and exciting and the characters are likeable. I laughed a couple of times and cried once. Still, it didn't strike as much of a chord with me as I expected.

To briefly sum up the main story: Meilin Lee, a confident, high-achieving thirteen-year-old, is happy with her life, although her wish to please her loving but overprotective mother Ming is starting to collide with her teenage interests such as hanging out with her friends and fangirling over a boy band. Then, the night after a particularly intense experience, Meilin suddenly turns into a giant red panda. She finds out that she can keep the panda in by controlling her feelings, but when her mother finds out what's going on, she's not surprised. Turning into a red panda when in an emotional state has been a feature for the women in the family for generations, but there is a ritual which can fix the problem. Until it can be performed, Meilin has to juggle her panda-ness and a plan to attend a concert with her friends featuring their beloved boy band 4 Town without their parents' knowledge (especially not Meilin's mother's).

Part of Turning Red really is relatable and/or believable. Early teenage life is in many ways captured well – the strong bond of friendship between Meilin and the girls she hangs out with (Miriam, Priya and Abby); their crushes on the 4 Town members which don't preclude an interest in boys closer to home; the way life can seem to conspire to embarrass you and the all-importance of certain events. But then there are some scenes that just felt overdone, and they mostly concern Ming. I have a hard time imagining a mother who, when discovering the romantic fantasy drawings her thirteen-year-old daughter has made of herself and a boy, leaps to the conclusion that something really has happened between them and races off to confront the oblivious youngster with her miserable daughter in tow. There's being overprotective, and then there's being plain daft. The way Ming embarrasses Meilin later in the story (while still under the impression that her daughter is suffering from her first periods, not red panda fits) also beggars belief, but I can just about buy it as an attempt to be discreet which goes completely awry. All the same, I think the film could have cut both these scenes and not lost out on much – the strains in the relationship between Meilin and Ming are already established elsewhere.

The red panda transformation, obviously, is a metaphor for puberty, and a somewhat too heavy-handed one. Many family films (and plenty of children's classics) work on two levels. There's the surface level of imaginative adventures, then there's a deeper level of questions raised which adults (and precocious children) can ponder if they want to. The problem with Turning Red is that the surface level doesn't quite work. The red panda shenanigans, though they are given an explanation in family lore, have difficulty standing on their own two feet. It's hard to disregard the link with female puberty and just see it as a fun girl-transforms-into-animal flick if one would choose to do so. I wouldn't be surprised if children who haven't hit puberty yet and see this film are left bemused about what's really going on, and I can't really blame those male YouTubers if they couldn't properly get into it.

That red panda is really cute, though.

Portrait of a dictator as an old man

I have this ambition to read at least a couple of novels by Nobel Prize-winning authors this year, not least because I suspect them to prove blog-worthy. So it's a little contradictory of me that I haven't been that keen on blogging about my first Nobel Prize-related read of the year, The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa (which I read in an English translation). It's partly because I didn't care for it as a whole, but also because I realised – too late – that the subject matter is somewhat sensitive, seeing as Vargas Llosa wrote about an oppressive regime from not that long ago, which many people must still have memories of. However, perhaps it's best not to overthink it. Parts of the novel did leave an impression, so I might as well go ahead and write about it, hoping I don't tread on too many toes in the process.

For some reason, Vargas Llosa (who's from Peru) hit on the idea of writing a book about the end of the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic. Or, more specifically, the end of Rafael Trujillo himself, who was shot in 1961 after thirty-odd years of ruling the country (officially or unofficially). The novel has three main plot strands: one follows a fictional character, Urania Cabral, daughter of a loyal Trujillista politician (also fictional), who returns to her home country in the Nineties for the first time since she left it at the age of fourteen after a nasty experience involving Trujillo. Urania feels the need to confront her father, even though he's suffered a major stroke and is more dead than alive. Plot strand number two follows Trujillo during the last day of his life more than thirty years earlier. Plot strand number three concerns his assassins, as they sit waiting for his car that same evening, debating whether he's going to show up at all. Most chapters are told from one of these three viewpoints, though some other characters join the mix towards the end of the novel. For instance, we get a chapter told from the point of view of Trujillo's successor Joaquín Balaguer, the puppet president who gains real power once his Chief is gone and uses it to steer the country towards democracy (but who nevertheless comes across as something of a slippery customer).

At first, I was frankly bored and irritated by the novel, fervently wishing that I'd tried Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter instead. All three plot strands seemed mostly an excuse for exposition. The unfortunate Urania has read obsessively about the Trujillo regime as a (not very effective) way of coping with her trauma, which is mighty convenient for an author who wants to show off what he knows. Also, the "Trujillo bad" message conveyed wasn't exactly mind-blowing. Wow, a modern dictator behaves in a modern-dictatory manner? Whatever next, dog bites man?

After some time, though, the Trujillo part of the story started to become more interesting. It made me sit up when, in the interactions with his goons, he didn't come out of it altogether badly. Modern dictators are often portrayed as either monstrous or pathetic (sometimes both), which can make us who are fortunate enough to live in democracies feel rather insufferably smug. We can tell ourselves there's no way we'd ever buy what these freaks and losers were selling. Vargas Llosa doesn't go down this easy path. His version of Trujillo is not without good points. He's disciplined, hard-working, intelligent and convinced that what he's doing is the best thing for his country. Even his enemies give him credit for appreciating talent in others. It's not hard to imagine how this man rose to power and kept it for more than three decades. At the same time, you understand why even some of his closest associates want to get rid of him (perhaps especially his closest associates – though generous with money, he's not the world's greatest boss). Even Vargas Llosa's focus on Trujillo's problems with his failing prostate doesn't come across as merely sneering. It's there to tie in with the Urania part of the story, but the prostate problems also serve as a symbol for old age, the one enemy the old bruiser is unable to fight against.

The conspirator part of the story also picks up as soon as they literally get into gear, ready to carry out their assassination plans, and things start to go pear-shaped from the word go. Here, it's the events rather than the characterisation that fascinate. The conspirators are an amiable enough bunch, if a little interchangeable. (There's an awful lot of name-dropping here and elsewhere – I must confess to only getting a reasonably clear idea of the role of one in ten characters mentioned throughout the novel. Why was that guy Fifí in the plot again?) Vargas Llosa does them something of a disservice by focusing on their personal reasons for wanting to kill Trujillo, when a little more patriotic fervour wouldn't have gone amiss. In the end, though, the tale of the conspiracy is engaging mainly because of how badly it's going. The assassins may succeed in killing Trujillo, but they are endearingly rubbish at plotting generally. When a high-ranking ally lets them down, they have no plan B and no exit strategy. They've not even considered how or with whom they could hide if things turned dangerous, which was always a strong possibility. I groaned when one of them confided that he'd purchased a strychnine pill to commit suicide with if the worst came to the worst. You don't commit suicide with strychnine! It's a horrible death. What, did the regime ban Agatha Christie books or something?

The Urania part of the story, though, never quite gelled with me. True, the event that triggered her trauma, which she recounts to her aunt and cousins when she's accused of being ungrateful to her father, is pretty horrific. Nevertheless, I'm afraid I thought she was a poorly written character and I couldn't feel much for her. In some scenes, as when at first she tries to avoid upsetting her relations, she becomes more human, but before long she's back in Scarred Victim mode. Quite often she acts as a plot contrivance to impart information to the readers – telling her relatives the gist of her past experiences would have been quite enough, but as we readers need to know the gruesome details, she recounts it all. When she doubts that she's done the right thing afterwards, she cheers herself up by remembering the fate of Trujillo's Chief of Intelligence Johnny Abbes. Vargas Llosa clearly wants us to know he got his comeuppance in the end, but as said comeuppance came with collateral damage, it's in somewhat poor taste for Urania – and, I must say, Vargas Llosa – to gloat over it. More importantly, Urania has no reason to think about Abbes at all.

One more problem with the Urania story, which wouldn't have mattered in another kind of novel, is that she's a fictional character. If the whole novel had been mainly about fictional characters, with the historical characters serving as a backdrop, the tale of Urania's woes would have worked better, as an illustration of the sort of thing that could happen to you during Trujillo's reign. But sandwiched between characters with real counterparts and events that really did happen, the fictional elements feel awkward. The real Trujillo may have been a beast to some poor real-life fourteen-year-old, but he can't be accused of being a beast to Urania (or her father, for that matter), because they didn't exist. And if we are supposed to view Trujillo in The Feast of the Goat as merely a fictional character, then what was the object of the exercise?

In the end, however, I was impressed with parts of the novel, and I don't completely regret choosing it over Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter. Vargas Llosa's instincts as a novelist prevent it from becoming merely a political pamphlet, and the message that at least I was left with – that dictatorships are generally a terrible idea, even when the person in charge doesn't appear to be a total nutcase – is not a bad one.