Production Designer Rona Liu helped develop the vibrant look and feel of the film, bringing director Domee Shi’s vision to life.
Animated Views: Interview on Rona Liu for ‘Turning Red’
Q: The pastel colors and the overall palette of the movie seem rather girly, but at the same time, the appeal of film is universal. How did you succeed that balance?
A: We never thought our colors as girlish or boyish ; it was never driven by gender. A lot of the references we used was pastel photography. If you search pastel photography on Instagram, you’re gonna get all these hits, and I think that aesthetics is characteristic of that generation. It’s kind of an homage to the 90s. It’s just what people were into at that time, and this is something that we still are into. We really love this aesthetic, and it also makes us feel like this is what we would have been into at 13 as well, and it’s the perfect way to depict an innocent young girl’s world.
We also needed emotionally to go somewhere color-wise. So, we started out in this innocent mode. Meilin’s very confident, she knows who she is, and we start out very peaceful, very pastel, very low-contrast. I thought it supported who she was as a character. But then as she evolves, we can start punching up the contrast, the saturation, and when you get to third act, you have some very high contrast, with very dark colors. The pastels are no longer pastels, they’re extremely saturated and in your face. For us, it was also a storytelling tool, to make sure that the audience subconsciously gets that the colors are supporting this excitement and tension.
Q: How did you get so accurate in terms of reconstructing the 2000s?
A: A lot of our research happened as we invited everybody to go back and bring up their yearbook photos. So, we had these boards of everybody’s 13-year-old pictures. People brought in their yearbooks and we were just looking at yearbook photos, what clubs they were part of, what musical instruments they played. And if you were a mom or a dad, you could bring in pictures of your kids. Our graphic director Laura Meyer’s daughter actually made a music video to, I think, NSYNC or something, and she brought that in. People tried to connect to the film any way they could, because we either have all been there before or we have people that were there right now. That’s kind of where our references initially went from. Then we searched on Google and Getty images to make sure that we’re not getting references of kids from now but of kids of the time. For instance, none was using smartphones then, everybody was using cellphones and maybe even pagers. There’s also the type of backpacks people had, the types of pencils and pens kids would use back then… All kind of things that were specific to that time.