Write on the front
Perhaps, every child who experiences adolescence can see his own shadow in it
The protagonist of the film, 13-year-old Li Meiling is an ordinary girl living in Toronto, by chance, she found herself inheriting the mysterious bloodline of the family, and when she was emotionally excited, she would turn into a huge red panda, and the story unfolded in her adolescence, the confusion of friendship, the confusion of self, especially in the family, and the contradictions with her mother.
What is a red panda
A very interesting setting in the film is that when Mei Ling is emotional, she will become a huge destructive red panda, and the appearance of the red panda not only makes her the focus of attention in the school, but most importantly, gives her the courage to separate from the "good child" in the eyes of the original parents and be herself.
In fact, it is not difficult to guess from the timing of the appearance of the red panda in the film, including the surrounding reactions, it represents a physiological phenomenon that every woman will appear at a certain stage of life: the first menarche of women.
This physiological change is directly reflected in the change of mood, Mei Ling no longer suppresses her desire for the opposite sex as before, and she begins to disobey her parents' orders.
She no longer suppresses herself, and the red panda is the embodiment of her own desire.
And with that comes the restless, restless, hair that demands independent self-awareness.
She confessed that she had lived the expectations of her parents all her life.
It's a woman's growing sense of self between stepping out of her girlhood but not yet being able to accept herself as a woman, and she's trying to figure out who she is.
And one of the settings in the film that dares to break through the traditional gender discipline is that it mentions a purification ceremony passed down from generation to generation, and every female heir of Xinyi will seal her inner red panda with a ritual on the night of a full moon.
This can actually be seen as a kind of gender castration, where women abandon their desires and natures and are shaped little by little into the image of a perfect wife, and this family pattern has been inherited for thousands of years.
In the ceremony, a mirror-like exit is set, on the side of the mirror, is the beauty in the eyes of others, that is, the beauty in real life, when she passes her hand through the mirror, the mirror image of the red panda appears, which symbolizes that the two sides are one and the same.
On the other side of the mirror is her inner true self, and she suddenly wakes up at the last moment of the ceremony that the red panda is not her enemy, but a part of herself, and that her self without the red panda is incomplete.
So she interrupted the ceremony and expressed her true desires/desires to her parents for the first time.
2. Parents' expectations
Perhaps the most resonant thing about this movie is the contradictions and disputes between the children and the parents in it.
The mother in the film can be said to fit the role of the East Asian family structure.
When seeing Mei Ling's fantasy album, the mother's first reaction is not to accept that this is the child's natural psychology, but to blame all the faults on the boy who has never met, and at the subsequent party, she did not consider Mei Ling's feelings at all, blamed everything on her friend's instigation, and even forced her to choose between her friend and her mother.
But the psychological motivation behind her is the same: my child is the most perfect in the world, he will carry out all the will of his parents, and if he becomes bad, it must be the people around him who are in trouble.
Do you feel very familiar, parents actually do not treat the child as an independent person, but a kind of self-value extension, and children in such a state, in fact, are subconsciously pleasing their parents, only by completing the parents' indicators, they are valuable.
Many people, just like this, have been longing for their parents' recognition all their lives.
Why do children now have depression and suicide at every turn, on the one hand, there is naturally social pressure, but on the other hand, I want to point out directly: parents play an absolutely non-negligible accomplice role, in such a family pattern, a child who does not meet the expectations of parents is worthless, is a mutilated product, which is destructive to the growth of personality.
Honestly, I've always wondered what a child's grades are all about their parents.
When the child has a good exam, are the parents really happy for the child, and when the child fails the exam, where does the parent's anger come from?
But if you think of children as an extension of the self, everything makes sense, they are actually using children as a means of measuring self-worth.
It can be infinitely approached to this formula: children have good grades = parents are well educated = projection of self-worth.
The parents hold such a rope in their hands and tie it firmly to the child's body, and this rope is called love.
Perhaps the most appropriate comment from a Douban netizen is that only East Asians can empathize with this movie, because we all need to apologize for failing our mother's expectations.
3. A semi-female perspective film
Although the whole film is developed from a female perspective, and indeed shows a very deep family structure, there is one thing that many people still overlook: male aphasia.
It is precisely this point of absence, so I can only say that it is a semi-female perspective of the film.
In Chizuru Ueno's book "Misogyny", it is clearly stated that a daughter cannot like herself and cannot fall in love with her mother, because the mother and daughter are separated from each other, and the misogyny of daughters is always self-loathing including the mother.
But it was his husband who implanted misogyny into the mother's brain, the mother was the surrogate of the father's misogyny, and the daughter learned of the father's misogyny through the patriarchal surrogate mother.
The film may want to highlight this East Asian family structure, mainly focusing on the struggle between two women, so the contradiction comes from between women, stimulated between women, and ends between women, and men are out of the way and disappear in the family, but this disappearance is not an exit, but a bystander.
In the film, the role of the father gives you what it feels like, a little bit unspeakable, even when he appears, he is just doing something insignificant, cooking, reading the newspaper, he seems to play a supporter role in the growth of his daughter, like a good person, and seems to have no contribution to the development of the plot.
Let me tell you what this feeling is: it is absent, he seems to be full of love for his daughter, but in fact, he is not involved in the growth of his daughter, and our society's expectation of the role of father is like this.
Because the father lives on the A side, the A side is the man's world, the male-dominated place outside the family, and the B side is the family, the man is not required, nor does he have any expectations, just occasionally teaching and understanding the situation of the child has completed his mission in the family, and in contrast, the mother, no matter how much effort is poured into the child, may still be regarded as a "derelict" mother.
Write at the end
Perhaps for me, the film is still too idealistic, too many children have not seen the red panda, just let it forever sealed in the depths of the heart during the ceremony, occasionally heard a roar, but also in a trance overshadowed by the noise of the vacuum cleaner.