Mei thinks she has everything under control. But she is starting to “grow up”, to change from a child into an adult, and that is harder than it sounds.

One morning, she wakes up as a giant red panda. From then on, it happens every time she feels something strongly. She looks in the mirror, screams, and locks the bathroom door. She is “embarrassed”: shy and uncomfortable because of how she looks.

Her mother knocks, and Mei’s face goes hot. When your face turns red because you are embarrassed, you “blush”, or you “go red”. English speakers often say, “I went bright red.” Mei goes red in a much bigger way than most of us.

At school, the panda has to stay a secret. Now every small thing makes her “self-conscious”: too aware of yourself, and of what other people might be thinking.

At thirteen, nobody wants to “stand out”: to be easy to notice, and different from everyone around you. And Mei is now a bright red animal the size of a small car.

Then Ming finds her daughter’s drawings of Devon, a boy who works at the local shop. She marches to the shop and shows them to him, while Mei’s classmates watch. Mei is “mortified”: so embarrassed that she wants to disappear.

There is a word for how we watch a scene like that. You “cringe”: you feel embarrassed for someone else, and you want to look away.

A moment like that is “cringey”. A mother waving her daughter’s drawings around a shop is about as cringey as a family scene can get.

English has an even stronger way to say it: you could “die of embarrassment”. Nobody really dies; it just means the feeling is enormous.

Her friends see the panda, and they love it. They also have an idea: people will pay to meet a giant red panda, and that money can buy 4*Town tickets. So Mei starts to “make a fool of herself” on purpose, doing silly things in front of other people. For once, she enjoys it.

At home, though, things get “awkward”: uncomfortable, with nobody sure what to say. We use that word for silences, questions and people. An “awkward silence” is one that nobody knows how to fill. Mei and her mother have quite a few.

The family have a plan. On the night of the red moon, a ceremony can take the panda away for good. But the 4*Town concert is that same night. And Mei is starting to wonder if she wants to “grow out of” the panda at all. To grow out of something is to stop needing it as you get older.

The words reviewers reach for are the five bonus words above. For NPR, the film turns the emotions of being a teenager into vivid, colourful pictures, and plenty of other writers described its energy as bubbly and lively. Empire welcomed how openly it deals with the business of becoming an adult, while a good number of reviewers counted it among the boldest, most risk-taking pictures the studio has made. Sight and Sound enjoyed the light, silly happiness of its jokes, and although critics disagreed — sometimes noisily — over how realistic it feels, the majority decided that it does.