It's just a movie that missed it's mark and had poor direction. I wouldn't bother with allegories or hidden meanings because the surface level stuff falls flat.
A lot of that stems from the fact that the people who make that bean mouth art style never seem to bother with an underlying structure - if you ever look at the sketchbooks and portfolios of the artists 99.9% of their character art is this art style is the same 3/4 headshots - so what already looks lazy in two dimensions becomes grotesque in three. You can tell nobody who worked on this had any idea what to do with the nose outside of mashing together random triangle shapes and planting it dead center on an otherwise shapeless face and spherical jawline; I cringe every time a character in both this and Luca was shown in profile for how obvious it was that the nose just didn’t belong there or that lip sync devolved into PAC Man mouth flapping. How they went from The Incredibles to this is depressing.
What was wrong with Inside Out was that it was literally the first Toy Story reheated and put inside a teenager's brain, so suddenly it's deep and thought-provoking or some such shit.
So "panda" is a metaphor for vagina. She's selling pictures and in person viewings of her vagina so she can see a boy band.
While I don't know enough about the artist to make any judgement, in fact she might not be related to how a lot of the plot ends up at all, I do not believe for a second Pixar doesn't have plenty of people willing to push for the 'cuties' angle. I'd imagine that the company already attracted people like this since they produce media aimed mostly at children, to sell merchandise mostly to children. And with the ousting of some of the old guard like Lasseter, there was more space to fill in.
They want to take the parents out of the equation entirely, so they can
What the fuck
Even without the puberty metaphor it’s still a pretty bungled message. “Be yourself! … So long as people can make money off it.”
The panda thing is a metaphor for puberty, the period shit is separate entirely and mostly used for gags. They sell merch relating to Mei's panda form to buy tickets to go to a concert.
At Least Cars 2 and the Good Dinosaur were movies that appealed to a general audience and felt like a movie that a family could all like. Turning Red looks like it’s not for a general audience, but rather a specific one.
Half the population of the planet? Coming of age movies are pretty common.
I've seen plenty of praise for the film from the audience it's actually aimed at. I'm not its target audience either but managed to enjoy it just fine, maybe it's just not your cup of tea.
