A new lyric video for one of the hit 4*Town songs from Pixar Animation Studios’ latest film, Turning Red, is now available and will have you tapping your toes and singing along in no time, as if you weren’t already!
What’s Happening:
- The official DisneyMusicVEVO has released a special new lyric video featuring one of the songs from the fictitious boy band, 4*Town, from the latest Pixar Animation Studios film, Turning Red.
- The lyric video goes to their song, “U Know What’s Up,” which is heard during the end credits of the film, and during the montage where Mei and her friends are hustling her panda abilities to make money to get tickets for the 4*Town concert that is taking place in Toronto in the film.
- This video, while providing the lyrics to the song, is not your typical sing-along video with a bouncing ball, but rather a highly kinetic animated spectacle with iconography and stylization reminiscent of the film.
- According to director Domee Shi, if you set a 13-year-old girl’s coming-of-age story in the early 2000s, it’s pretty much mandatory to include a boy band. “We needed our character Mei to be obsessed with something that her mom would not approve of,” said Shi. “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 a way of bringing girls and their besties together. Plus, I thought it’d be really cool to create an animated boy band.”
- Enter Pixar’s first-ever boy band, 4*Town. GRAMMY-winning Music Producer and President of Walt Disney Music Tom MacDougall arranged a meeting with the Turning Red filmmakers and singer-songwriters Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell. “When deciding what musical artists to meet with on our films, we don’t look to who’s the most popular, but who’s best suited to the creative needs of the project,” says MacDougall. “In the case of Billie and Finneas, we were lucky to have both.”
- Designed to bring a crowd to its feet, “U Know What’s Up” features a sing-along style. Says Eilish, “That was the last one we wrote—and the most challenging. We wanted to make these fans feel confident and independent: ‘I’m gonna make it all the way—just watch me. I’m gonna hustle every day. Making paper like it’s origami. I only came to win the game. Can’t stop me.’” “We did a whole call-and-response second verse,” adds O’Connell. “It’s a motivational song—that’s the goal.”
- 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 (Bao) and produced by Lindsey Collins.
- Turning Red is now streaming on Disney+.
Sign up for Disney+ or the Disney Streaming Bundle (Disney+, ESPN+, and ad-supported Hulu) now