I can’t, really. It’s a movie from an American company, and I don’t think setting it in Toronto rather than in a US city will make much difference to the deteriorating Hollywood-PRC relationship.
Thank you for the link. I am now throughly convinced that my speculation was completely baseless.
I have a simple question… why did they set the movie twenty years in the past? It seemed strange to me for them to explicitly call out 2002 as the year the movie was set in, when AFAIK, there wasn’t much in the way of anything that was early-oughts specific.
Except possibly the complete absence of smartphones… maybe the whole point was that in 2022, there would be no hiding the panda because everyone has phones with cameras, which wasn’t the case in 2022. (everyone had cell phones, just not with cameras).
It just seemed a little bit strange for a Disney movie to be set specifically in 2002 Toronto without any real reasons why it wasn’t Anytown USA in some vague “present day”.
Otherwise, I thought it was fine. Not exactly my cup of tea; I kind of wanted to throw the mother and grandmother into a wood chipper, but YMMV.
Well, as noted above, it’s based on the director/writer’s childhood which would’ve been at the same time. Also, “4-Town” is very much an early-2000’s boy band.
Because the writer was 13 twenty years ago, I think.
Even then there was some footage captured. The grandmother saw it on TV in Florida.
Did the writer turn into a panda when she was a girl, also?
Because that’s not really a reason for a specific 2002 setting. Phone cameras make more sense.
When Shi started this film, she was very clear in making her story specific. The exact setting of Toronto in 2002 was chosen by Shi for a reason: It was a nostalgic period for Shi herself.
Reasons don’t have to make sense.
But they do have to rhyme.
It just seemed weird to me to call out 2002 as the setting, and then literally do nothing that had anything to do with 2002 specifically. Nostalgia or not, that seemed a bit weird, just like the Toronto setting.
How is setting it in Toronto weird?
I thought of the phone thing while I was watching it. In addition to that reason, it makes perfect sense for a filmmaker to want to evoke the look and feel of a particular time and place. It’s art.
Why not? It’s pretty common for story tellers to draw on their own experiences when telling stories. This is quite common.
There were plenty of early-2000s/late-90s references. I really don’t get why this is hard to understand.
Tamagatchi, for one. That’s where Ming’s Panda spirit ended up.
“Write what you know.”
My sense is that the creative process was wanting to write a story grounded in the specifics that she grew up with, mixed in with having doodled out a cute red panda, and creating a story that could connect those elements.
Pretty sure that some of the coming of age issues Mei Lin was dealing with are of her experience as well.
As an aside, I was called out on Reddit for saying this, saying it lead to shitty writing. The person was so vehement they got banned.
To me, it seemed like the director was going for a nostalgic, idealized take on her own childhood, and I can name a bunch of books, films and shows with that same motivation.
Outside of the boy band, what exactly were these turn-of-the-century references? And FWIW, the boy band could have just as easily been One Direction, and not Nsync or 98 Degrees.
I just felt it was weirdly specific with neither a storytelling reason, or any real leaning into the setting or time period. What about the movie couldn’t have been set in say… Houston in 2014, substituting the Minute Maid Park for the Sky Dome, and making the boy band a little more One Directionish?
That’s my point- there wasn’t squat that actually tied it to 2002 Toronto in a particularly firm way, and that seemed weird. It’s all fine and good that the writer/director had some sort of nostalgic moment when writing it, but the details were oddly specific, and yet didn’t advance the plot, story OR character in the least bit.
But you could just as easily say, “Why was it set in Houston in 2014? Why set it specifically in that year when the year was mentioned and then not used to advance the plot? That seems weirdly specific for 2014 not to mean anything.”
Exactly!
That’s what I’m getting at. The specific time and place seemed strange in that it didn’t actually mean anything in the story whatsoever, so I’m not sure why they didn’t just make it more generic.
Toronto is Domee Shi’s hometown.
And Ming’s Giant Red Panda spirit ultimately ended up inside Mei’s Tamagotchi, which was much more of a thing in 2002 than it is in 2022. Instead of ignoring it, she has to constantly take care of it now.