Bao, the incredible.
Domee Shi spent her childhood and adolescence helping her mother prepare the baos and dumplings that would be eaten later on weekends and holidays. Domee Shi was born in China and raised in Toronto, meaning between two cultures: away from home, Canadian; inside, china. With those childhood memories, Domee Shi has created Bao, the short film that precedes Pixar's latest release, Incredibles 2; with which he not only softens, makes hungry and teaches but, in addition, has become the first woman to direct a short film at Pixar (so long, Lasseter days).
“As a child, I always felt overprotected by my mother like a little dumpling. My Chinese mother was always making sure that she didn't go too far away from me, that she was safe. She wanted to explore that hyperprotective relationship between a son and her parents using a Chinese dumpling as a metaphor”, Shi says.
Who can resist a bao?
Shi is that dumpling, a bathroom that she wakes up in her bamboo basket just before her mother goes to eat it. A Chinese mother who is sad, she suffers from empty nest syndrome and she decides to welcome this endearing dumpling as her new son.
But this new son, although he is a dumpling, also grows very fast. Reach adolescence, that superb age when you don't like your parents and you don't understand that everything they do – even that Chinese food feast – they do it for you. And the dumpling keeps growing and growing until it's time to leave home, with his girlfriend.
Loving dumplings.
At that moment ** [SPOILER ALERT], ** her mother fulfills the hidden wish of any mother who never leaves not her house, but herself and ** [super SPOILER ALERT] ** she eats the dumpling . Something dark for Pixar? No, if you haven't understood anything up to this point, the following scene with the flesh and blood child explains everything: it's not a recreation of Saturn devouring his children, it was a metaphor.
“My mother would always hug me very tight when she was older and she would say things like, ‘I wish I had put you back in my tummy so I knew exactly where you were at all times,'” says Domee Shi. She felt those words like “strange and sweet”, as is her Bao, irresistible, because… who can resist a bao? “When you see something very cute, like a baby, we have all said at some point: "It's so cute, it's to eat it", remembers the cheerleader, who took that little phrase to the end.
When Bao gets older...
Not everyone understood the metaphor and the short created great controversy at the premiere of the film in the US. But beyond the film's twist more praised than its accompanying feature length, the long-awaited sequel to The Incredibles, Domee Shi used the story as "A Trojan horse to introduce people to what Baos is, Chinatown and what it's like and how to live in a Chinese house."
Thus, it is full of details. “Like the cheesy calendar we buy at the supermarket, the lucky cat on the shelf, the rice cooker…”, lists the first female director of a short at Pixar (About Time). And, in addition to talking about Chinese culture, about Chinese immigrants, she talks about topics as universal as motherhood, family and how food unites us all (that's why we like it so much at Traveler) .