Disney and Pixar’s animated movie Turning Red (2022)
Credit: © Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

What’s red, fluffy, and loves boy bands? Pixar’s newest movie Turning Red is a big hit shining a spotlight on red pandas. Turning Red is an animated motion picture released by Pixar Animation Studios and the Walt Disney Company in 2022. It tells the story of a young Chinese-Canadian girl who discovers she can shapeshift into a red panda. The movie is set in Toronto. It was the first Pixar movie created by an all-woman leadership team.

Turning Red tells the story of the Chinese-Canadian 13-year-old Meilin “Mei” Lee, who lives in Toronto. Mei’s family includes her mother, Ming, and father, Jin. They maintain a Chinese temple dedicated to their ancestor Sun Yee. Mei works to balance pleasing her mother and being herself with her friends Abby Park, Miriam Mendelsohn, and Priya Mangal. Mei and her friends obsess over a boy band called 4*TOWN. After Ming embarrasses her daughter, Mei has a nightmare about red pandas and wakes up transformed into a giant red panda. Mei hides her transformation from her parents. But, she cannot keep her newfound ability hidden for long, and its discovery leads her to secrets in her family’s past.

The Lee family is voiced by Rosalie Chiang (Mei); Sandra Oh (Ming); Orion Lee (Jin); and Wai Ching Ho (Mei’s grandmother Wu). Mei’s friends are voiced by Hyein Park (Abby); Ava Morse (Miriam); and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan (Priya).

The film was directed by the Chinese-Canadian animator and screenwriter Domee Shi and the American playwright and television writer Julia Cho. The American actor and producer Lindsey Collins produced the film.

The film’s soundtrack, also released in 2022, features original songs written and composed by the Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson. The American singer-songwriter siblings Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell wrote three original songs performed by 4*TOWN in the film.

In real life, red pandas are adorable and unique creatures. A red panda is a medium-sized mammal with a red coat and a long, ringed tail. The red panda is also called the lesser panda, in reference to the much larger giant panda. Red pandas are not closely related to giant pandas or any other living animal. Red pandas live in bamboo forests on upper mountain slopes. Red pandas are arboreal—that is, they live in trees. A red panda has adaptations that allow it to climb trees easily including its tail for balancing and flexible ankles which allow it to climb headfirst down trees. They are found in parts of Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, and Nepal.

Human population growth in the Himalayan region threatens the habitat of the red panda. Deforestation has reduced the area where red pandas live in the wild. Red pandas are in danger of dying out completely. They are protected by national and international laws. Scientists and wildlife officials have worked to help ensure the pandas’ survival by protecting their habitat and breeding them in zoos.

April 13, 2020

In late March, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in New York City named the computer scientists Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan as the recipients of the annual A. M. Turing Award. The award is given to one or more individuals each year in recognition of contributions of lasting importance in the field of computing. Catmull and Hanrahan were honored for their work on three-dimensional (3-D) computer graphics and the impact of these techniques on computer-generated imagery (CGI). Their work has greatly influenced the motion picture and video game industries as well as the fields of augmented reality and virtual reality.

The 1995 film Toy Story used 3-D animation software created in part by Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan, the winners of this year’s A. M. Turing Award. Credit: © Walt Disney Pictures/ZUMA Press

Ed Catmull is a former president of Pixar and Disney Animation Studios. Pat Hanrahan, a founding employee at Pixar, is a professor in the Computer Graphics Laboratory at Stanford University. Catmull and Hanrahan helped guide Pixar through its early years (the animation studio was created in 1986), and they helped create the “RenderMan” graphics system that gives two-dimensional images a 3-D appearance.

Under Catmull, Pixar used the RenderMan software to produce the motion picture Toy Story (1995), the first fully computer-animated feature film. Pixar then used RenderMan in a number of highly successful Toy Story sequels and other animated films. RenderMan software has also been used in numerous video games and in such blockbuster live-action films as Avatar, Titanic, and movies in the “Lord of the Rings,” “Jurassic Park,” and “Star Wars” series.

Alan M. Turing (at right) was an English mathematician and computer pioneer. He made important contributions to the development of electronic digital computers. Credit: Heritage-Images/Science Museum, London

The A. M. Turing Award is named after Alan Mathison Turing, a British mathematician and computer pioneer. Turing made key contributions to the development of electronic computers, including his work helping to build the first British electronic digital computer. In 1950, he proposed a test for determining if machines might be said to “think.” This test, now called the Turing test, is still central to discussions of artificial intelligence.

The first Turing Award was given to the American computer scientist Alan J. Perlis in 1966 for his role in developing influential computer-programming techniques. Since then, an award has been given every year. As of 2014, the award includes a $1 million cash prize. Catmull and Hanrahan are scheduled to receive the A.M. Turing Award at ACM’s annual awards banquet on June 20, 2020, in San Francisco, California. That event is contingent, of course, on the containment or continued spread of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.