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When Pixar is at its finest, it is unmatched, creating films that are witty, endearing, and brilliantly creative in order to touch the heart and pique the imagination. That’s why it’s been depressing to see the animation company behind emotionally powerful successes like “Toy Story,” “Ratatouille,” “Up,” and “Inside Out” – among the best movies of their respective years by a wide margin — now fall short of its previous standard of greatness.
It’s not just that recent Pixar originals like “Soul,” “Luca,” and “Turning Red” have all, strangely enough, been focused on characters changing into animals (a revealing trope for its prevalence in movies about feeling different, whose initially diverse protagonists invariably spend the majority of the runtime covered in fur or scales). It’s also not just that modern Pixar has focused on reprising its greatest hits with a parade of sequels (“Toy Story 4,” Additionally missing recently at Pixar, a Disney subsidiary since 2006, is the studio’s legendary command of execution, a genius for creating grandiose settings and deftly navigating their specifics.
The studio’s most recent film, “Elemental,” feels illustrative of its battle to reclaim its initial brilliance. It messes up its world-building in service of a predictable plot that belittles the skill of the animators involved. The film, which was directed by Peter Sohn and based on a screenplay by John Hoberh, Kat Likkel, and Brenda Hsueh, aims high with that central metaphor but is immediately thrown off-balance by its awkwardness as a racial allegory. This problem is exacerbated by haphazard pacing and writing that is so blatantly predictable it makes it seem like a Pixar movie written by an AI algorithm. The movie, which occasionally verges on the absurd, feels underdeveloped rather than all-encompassing, a vibrant missed opportunity.
Prior to its domestic release in mid-June, “Elemental” was shown as the closing-night selection of the 76th Cannes Film Festival. It imagines a densely populated urban sprawl akin to that of Disney’s anthrozoomorphic “Zootopia,” in which concepts of racial discrimination were awkwardly reduced to “predator and prey” dynamics to allow for a narrative that concentrated more on eradicating individual prejudices than systemic racism. A similar unwise simplification is at work in Element City (although Sohn has explained that his Korean heritage and desire to make a movie about assimilation fueled some of the creative decisions), and there is even a similar eyebrow to raise with regard to the real danger that these contrasting elements, like foxes to rabbits, pose to one another.
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In “Elemental,” the socially well-off water people move back and forth through sleekly designed high-rises and have no problem splashing down the city’s grand canals and monorails, which were designed for their gelatinous-blob bods, while the fire people are confined to Firetown, where their close-knit community reflects East Asian, Middle Eastern, and European traditions—and where accents range from Italian to Jamaican, Iranian, and West Indian in a way that un While we witness cloud puffs that resemble cotton candy playing “airball” in Cyclone Stadium and earth people with flowers sprouting from their dirt-brown armpits, earth and air scarcely register in the movie’s depiction of the chemistry of inner-city elements interacting. The actual ins and outs of Element City are only briefly addressed, such as the discovery that all of these elements use the same public transportation. Background sight gags abound, such as the “hot logs” that fire folk eat. Its environment feels more like concept art, to be further refined at some point in the animation process, than a completely thought-out, lived-in environment. It is full of computer-generated inhabitants and generic modernist structures.
The protagonist of “Elemental” is the irritable, second-generation immigrant Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis of “The Half of It”), who works as an assistant at her father’s bodega. Ember and her father Trádár Bùrd (Ronnie del Carmen), who is preparing her to take over the family business, have a close relationship despite having their names Anglicized to Bernie and Cinder at the “Elemental” equivalent of Ellis Island. Trádár Bùrd is a Fire person who emigrated from Fireland, where they brought spicy food and strict cultural traditions of honor and lineage. But Ember wonders if she really wants to inherit the business as her beloved “ashfa” claims he anticipates, or if her gifts—like the capacity to heat a hot-air balloon and shape glass with her hands—might point her in a different way.
Elemental Quiz
One day, Ember bursts a pipe in her father’s store due to her inability to regulate her emotions, which can cause her to turn from red-hot to a more menacing shade of purple. At this time, city inspector Wade (Mamoudou Athie) rushes in. Wade has been looking into the city’s outdated canal system in an effort to find the cause of a leak that continually flooding Ember’s basement while endangering Firetown as a whole. Ember follows Wade before immediately joining forces with him in an effort to save her father’s company from failing. As their relationship develops, they make an especially strange coupling given one of the movie’s less-than-persuasive rules: that “elements don’t mix” in Element City for both practical and localized reasons. Ember might put out Wade’s fire while he might put out hers, but their unavoidably hot relationship is even more prohibited because Wade’s father would never approve, making “Elemental” the first Pixar film to feature an interracial love story with human characters.
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From there, the movie plays out like a checklist of Pixar storytelling tropes, with its two polar opposites initially getting on each other’s nerves but eventually developing a close bond. They later split up over what seems like a simple misunderstanding, which is then resolved in a dramatic way when they save one another from an impending threat and rediscover their love. Ember and Wade’s connection nonetheless becomes the film’s small but lovable heart as the plot’s rapidly hurried series of events keeps them together, providing a pleasant diversion from the muddled metaphors and misshaped conceptual mechanics that frequently threaten to shatter the story’s inner reality. (For instance, why is it so mysterious to both Ember and Wade what will happen if they contact in a city where ceramic and terracotta glass structures indicate the interaction of other elements?)
While the animation of both of their bodies—hers flickering then suddenly ablaze with emotion, heat wafting upward; his fluid and transparent, prone to collapsing into a puddle on the ground—is always exciting to look at, emphasizing malleability and dabbling in abstraction. Lewis voices Ember with a playful warmth that nicely complements the bubbling affability that Athie brings to Wade.
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The film’s effective use of color, form, and movement, however, is constrained by its unoriginal plot. Only a few standout scenes distinguish “Elemental” from other Pixar movies where characters are phosphorescent little blobs traveling through realistically animated cityscapes—a visit to an underwater garden of Vivisteria flowers, for example—and despite how quickly the plot advances, it never takes an unexpected turn.
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With the exception of a rich score by composer Thomas Newman that takes its cues from a potpourri of global musical traditions and presents a more fully formed vision of cross-cultural exchange than the movie’s muddled depiction of immigrant communities, there is nothing in “Elemental” to recall the wondrous aesthetic imagination of contemporary Pixar classics like “Finding Nemo” and “Wall-E.” “Elemental” is explosive enough from minute to minute, but it vanishes from memory the moment you leave the theater—perhaps aptly for a movie that could have been called “When Fire Met Water…”
The Cannes Film Festival in 2023 is where this critique was submitted. Right now, “Elemental” is showing in theaters.
