[Filmmaker Chat] Domee Shi, Oscar Winner and Rich Pick

An impromptu conversation with a visual artist

Hello, readers! Today I had the opportunity chat briefly with Domee Shi, writer and director of both the Academy Award winning animated short film Bao (2018) and the Rich Pick and Academy Award nominated animated feature film Turning Red (2022) after a presentation she gave on her creative process (see photos throughout). The conversation was short, a couple of exchanges during a social after-hour, but I nevertheless had the opportunity to ask a question I always want to ask not even just filmmakers, but moreover artists in general, especially whenever their works evidence a deep underlying knowledge of storytelling histories and structural forms: “How much of your final product was conscious building vs. intuitive sense-making (or even just luck)?”

As I explained to a friend and fellow presentation attendee, I always want the answer to this question, because the actual answer itself and the processing of developing it both tell me so much about the creative mind at work.

• Were the best parts of the finished product happy accidents or deliberate achievements?

• Did the artist consider the architecture of the piece thematically, or just find it intuitively?

• How thoroughly did the artist seek to incorporate the new work into an alive history of work that is thematically, materially, or emotionally similar; or was the coincidence of themes, materials, and feelings I noticed in the final product the unintended consequence of an inescapably culturally embedded art-maker?

These questions, for me, are core to genuinely understanding any artwork. Vermeer’s paintings resonate and endure, because he was consciously and deliberately choosing to investigate optics, light, and color on his canvasses. That investigation, at the forefront of the science and the art of his day, is the richness, the juice, the meat, the heart of his talent and his place within the painting pantheon of at least the Western canon. The images of his we can still see are just the residue of the intellectual conversation he began nearly four hundred years ago but can continue to have with all of us about subjectivity vs. objectivity in viewership through those enduring statements which are his preserved works. Conversely, William Eggleston’s complete disavowal of intention or thought behind his photographs (see here for example) degrade the value of his works for me, despite their generally respected presences in photographic collections the world over. They, as the unintended residue of an empty mind, are hardly “better” for me than the accidental “masterpiece” an elephant can paint or the particularly picturesque accident of landscape that litter occasionally makes on the sidewalk. It is between these extreme examples, I hope to better understand the creative process of any especially applauded visual and/or storytelling artist, especially when I’ve written about that person’s artwork here, on this Substack. So, preicsely because Turning Red was for me a revelation in content and form (see my original take on it here, from March 2022), I wanted to hear writer-director Domee Shi’s answers to my questions.

Admirably, when asked, Shi’s answers pointed directly to a considered perspective on the history of fairy tales, especially modern fairy tales, about body change and human development. Speaking about the cultural immersion in turn-of-the=millennium Disney Channel movies like The Luck of the Irish. (Hoen [dir.], Price, & Edens [wri.], 2001) and The Thirteenth Year (Dunham [dir.], Arata, Baird, & Senecal [wri.], 1999), which she enjoyed in her younger days, as well as about later adolescent texts like MTV’s Teen Wolf (Davis [dev.], 2011-2017) in the same breath as direct inspirations behind Turning Red, Shi demonstrated a clearly marked reservoir of at least implicit knowledge of the storytelling tropes and themes that written and visual media have used to discuss or display what she affectionately called “magical puberty.” That said, the more intuitive awareness and inspiration she described appeared to be where her understanding and forethought had stopped; short of an explicit or conscious interrogation of the storytelling beats and forms in Grimms’ tales (1812) or even in modern media like Teen Wolf, Shi’s process — as I’ve observed many still respectable artists’ creative processes — didn’t ever attempt to critically filter through what seemed to her to be fluid notions around storytelling styles around these concepts, to then establish purposeful gestures or at least cognizant motifs within her films. When those gestures or motifs did happen, it therefore seemed, they were the “sense made” successes of intuitive discovery, happening within and through a culturally embedded mind. At least anecdotally for me, recognizing that her creative process fit this description made sense of the difficulty she’d described having earlier, with establishing a satisfying end to Turning Red’s plot — an ultimately satisfying conclusion it reportedly took her and her collaborators eight rounds of unsatisfying internal screenings to begin to envision. That difficulty, in charting a clear end for an intuitively discovered narrative, may be a typical challenge, if not the typical challenge, that any purely intuitive and self-referential artist will confront during a storytelling journey.

Now, that said, intuitive knowledge is still knowledge and, if anything, this brief chat with Shi was reassuring for me that she was and is trying to cut through the morass of her own intuition and sense-make through her filmmaking work, to produce final narrative media that are right thematically, materially, and emotionally. During her talk, she explained her insistence during the animation process of Turning Red that the motion style of the on-screen characters, especially in several key moments, remain “solitary” as opposed to “full-bodied.” Showing several stages of development to arrive at the below final motion of red panda Mei’s arm pushing the other girl into a stall,

Shi reflected on her conscious argument for an anime-like style in these gestures, a style notably different from the full-bodied movement (i.e., a step forward, with shoulders and arms together pushing the girl) Pixar’s default animation school recommends. These and other anecdotes about her creative choices and thought process, delving and embedding her work with the creative histories of various narrative disciplines, recommend her as an actively investigative artist whose future films I certainly look forward to seeing.