Pixar has unveiled the official trailer for Turning Red, and it teases a new song that Billie Eilish and FINNEAS wrote for the film.
The super-siblings actually contributed three tracks to the project, according to Variety, though they’ll be performed by the fictional boy band 4*Town. In the new trailer we hear a snippet of “Nobody Like U,” which features a female vocalist (Eilish perhaps?) beatboxing her heart out. But the moment soon passes, and most of the preview is soundtracked by *NSYNC’s “It’s Gonna Be Me,” a choice that plays off the viral “It’s Gonna Be May” meme to highlight the film’s protagonist, Mei.
Turning Red is director Domee Shi’s full-length directorial debut. It follows Mei (Rosalie Chiang), a 13-year-old girl who loves boy bands and math while chafing at her overprotective mother, Ming (Sandra Oh). The setting is the early 2000s, and as Shi explains, boy bands are essential to the story.
“We needed our character Mei to be obsessed with something that her mom would not approve of,” she said. “Boy bands were the first step into the world of boys for a lot of girls that age. The guys were all super pretty, polished, soft and loving, and they had of a way of bringing girls and their besties together. Plus, I thought it’d be really cool to create an animated boy band.”
The trailer shows Mei having a nightmare, as ominous red light bursts out of statues in a Chinese temple. She wakes to find she has transformed into an adorable, oversized red panda. “I’m a gross red monster!” she sobs, to which her father replies, “This happened already?”
As her mother explains, “Our ancestors had a mystical connection with red pandas,” a fact that fails to bring Mei any comfort. Turning Red bursts into theaters on March 11th, and you can check out the trailer below.
Eilish has been on a family-friendly tear of late, performing “Happier Than Ever” on Sesame Street and stepping in as Sally in Danny Elfman’s Nightmare Before Christmas concert. But she continues to express some more adult sentiments, and at a recent concert she addressed Texas’ near-total ban on abortion by saying, “My body, my fucking choice.”
