Pixar’s Turning Red pays homage to the boy bands of the 1990s with 4*Town, Mei and her friend’s favorite group. Here’s how Pixar created them.
Pixar’s Turning Red focuses around a group of teenage girls who are just trying to do whatever they can to get to a boy band concert. This feels like a page right out of my book, as I followed several different boy bands, particularly *NSYNC, around the country as a teenager. 4*Town is the group that Mei and her friends are obsessed with, who take inspiration from many boy bands of the 90s, and whose songs are written by Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas.
Director Domee Shi explains that the point of this group was to pay tribute to, mostly honor, but also make fun of a little, boy bands. When Mei’s red panda arrives, this transition brings her passions to the surface, one of which, is her love for 4*Town. Of course there is a lot of puberty nods here, and with it comes her realization that boys are cute, and she likes boys, but especially the boys who make up this band.
Related: 10 Fun Facts About Pixar’s Turning Red From The Creators
Creating 4*Town
Producer Lindsey Collins describes Turning Red as a movie about getting the girls to a boy band concert, against the backdrop of a magical puberty message. The team wanted something that feels life or death to a 13 year old girl, and this is certainly it. In order to create this boy band, a lot of inspirations from real life bands were used.
“So many girls’ and boys’ lives were shaped by their first musical obsessions, and boy bands represent for many girls this first foray into adolescence. Into music, fashion, pop culture, and they offer a safe, soft, and non-threatening introduction to subjects like love and relationships and sex. I specifically remember being 11 and horrifying my parents by belting out the lyrics to the Spice Girls song When 2 Become 1, completely oblivious to what it actually meant.” – Domee Shi, Director
For Mei, 4*Town represents a new and alluring world that is the total opposite of what her home life is like, and of what her mother has been teaching her. The idea of using a boy band was a fun little side gag in draft one, and in the final version of Turning Red, they are a large part of the main story.
There is certainly some real life inspiration behind these characters, the members of 4*Town. Domee Shi explains that they are a homage to all the boy bands she loved growing up in the late ’90s and early 2000s, like Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, O-Town, and 98 Degrees. But they also really wanted them to feel multicultural and even though they are like a homage to the boy bands of that era, they wanted to bring like a little bit of a modern touch to them too.
One of the boy band members, Tae Young, he’s definitely a homage to the K-pop boy bands that Domee got into in college. “I’m from the era of Big Bang and 2PM and all that good stuff. When we were designing the 4*Town band members we definitely had each boy’s purpose and their personality pinpointed.” Shi continues, “We have Robaire, who is Mei’s crush. He’s the leader of the group and the main vocalist. He will probably go on to have a very successful solo career. We pinpointed the cute one, the sporty one. Aaron T is the goofy one. Jesse is the pretty one. So they all have their own personalities and their own strengths.”
Bringing In Billie Eilish
Producer Lindsey Collins tells the story of bringing Billie Eilish into the project to write the songs for this band. Back in 2016, she was relatively unknown, but adored by Lindsey’s children. The song Ocean Eyes was on repeat in the house, and so she came to mind when the creative team was thinking about songwriters who could capture the early 2000s sound, but also bring something fresh to it.
“After further research with the Disney music team, we had a better sense of Finneas and Billie and their influences, their style, and figured, you know, why not start with our dream choice? It was such a weird ask — we weren’t even sure they’d take the meeting. We actually made this physical scrapbook that looked like something Mei would make. It had doodles and drawings and photos and fan art and fake ticket stubs and we cut out Billie and Finneas’s heads and put them on characters. Basically it was a glimpse inside Mei’s character and her obsession with this fictitious boy band, 4*Town.” – Lindsey Collins, Producer
Well, the scrapbook worked, because Billie and Finneas agreed and of course the team was thrilled that they did. They were their pie in the sky get, and they got them. Colilns says that their songs truly brought 4*Town to life. That’s not all though, Finneas even sings as one of the band members, Jesse.
Billie and Finneas wrote three original songs for Turning Red. Pixar told them they wanted a song that’s the confidence booster — the song that you sing to one of your friends when they’re feeling down. Also a hit song that everybody knows — the one that you can’t get out of your head and you belt it out at full volume, in the car when it comes on radio. And finally they wanted a love ballad — the song that makes you feel like you’ve just had your heart broken, even if you’re 13 years old and never been on a date.
According to Collins they really delivered! We can’t be the only ones looking forward to 4*Town, and these songs, that are sure to be on repeat after Turning Red exclusively comes to Disney+ on March 11th.
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About Turning Red
Disney and Pixar’s “Turning Red” introduces Mei Lee (voice of Rosalie Chiang), a confident, dorky 13-year-old torn between staying her mother’s dutiful daughter and the chaos of adolescence. Her protective, if not slightly overbearing mother, Ming (voice of Sandra Oh), is never far from her daughter—an unfortunate reality for the teenager.
And as if changes to her interests, relationships and body weren’t enough, whenever she gets too excited (which is practically ALWAYS), she “poofs” into a giant red panda! Directed by Academy Award® winner Domee Shi (Pixar short “Bao”) and produced by Lindsey Collins “Turning Red releases on March 11, 2022.
Turning Red comes exclusively to Disney+ on March 11th.
Tessa Smith is a Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer-approved Film and TV Critic. On Camera personality and TV / Film Critic with 10+ years of experience in video editing, writing, editing, moderating, and hosting.