Elemental
When it is functioning at full tilt, Pixar is unrivaled. The company regularly churns out clever, charming and dazzlingly original movies that can touch the heart and fire the imagination: “Toy Story,” “Ratatouille,” “Up” and “Inside Out” are among the best films of their respective years, bar none. So it has been disheartening in recent years to see this animation juggernaut now a subsidiary of Disney fall short of its own sterling record.
The trouble isn’t merely that late-period Pixar has leaned heavily on sequels (“Toy Story 4,” “Incredibles 2,” “Lightyear”) or that its recent run of originals (“Soul,” “Luca,” “Turning Red”) have all centered, oddly enough, on characters who turn into animals (a revealing trope about feeling different where, for some reason, people spend most of their time looking like themselves). It’s also that executional mastery the studio’s ability to establish high-concept premises with ease and then zip through their particularities has gone missing.
“Elemental,” which premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival before an anticipated mid june release in theaters and on Disney+, feels symptomatic of what’s been going wrong at Pixar these past few years. It gets world-building so wrong as to make a mess not only of its central metaphor but also of its story; it squanders the talent and effort on display from animators who seem capable of much more.
Directed by Peter Sohn from a screenplay by John Hoberh, Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh, the film is set in Element City, a New York-style metropolis where natural elements coexist? as different social classes? or something? Honestly I have no idea what EarthAirWaterFireTown is even supposed to be. But here we are.
The movie aspires to be a big old racial allegory but is immediately undone by the sheer unwieldiness of that central metaphor, an issue compounded by pacing that always feels either too slow or too fast and writing so flatly predictable it suggests a Pixar movie authored by an AI algorithm. It’s never less than bordering on nonsensical; it’s under developed rather than universal, a colorfully missed opportunity.
“Elemental” imagines a crowded urban sprawl not unlike the one in Disney’s anthropomorphic “Zootopia,” where ideas about systemic racism got awkwardly reduced to “predator and prey” dynamics so that the story could focus more safely on dismantling personal prejudices. In Element City, similarly ill-advised simplifications are at work (though Sohn has said his Korean heritage and desire to make a movie about assimilation fueled some of the creative decisions), and there’s even another eyebrow-raiser when it comes to how much real danger these contrasting elements foxes to rabbits, basically pose for each other.
Water people flow easily through slick high rises and have no problem splish splashing along canals or monorails that were clearly designed for their gelatinous-blob bodies, fire folk are ghettoized in Firetown, where they live in close knit communities whose physical design seems inspired by eastern/middle eastern European cities? And they talk with accents like Italian patois? Iranian patois? West Indian patois? I don’t know! Suffice it to say fire immigrants and water white upper-class is more than a little uncomfortable. Earth barely registers; we see people who sprout daisies from their armpits (because they’re earthy) and cloud puffs made out of cotton candy playing “airball” in Cyclone Stadium (because they’re airy). But the movie is cagey about exploring the chemistry of inner city elements.
Someone may spot a background sight giggle here and there like the “hot logs” that fire people eat, but it’s really just touching on the surface of Element City to explain that all these elements use the same public transportation. The setting is full of computer-generated people and generic modernist buildings; it feels more like something out of concept art, waiting to be filled in later in the animation process, than an actual environment anyone thought about living in.
This “Elemental” is about hot-tempered second generation immigrant Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis from “The Half of It”), who works as an assistant in her dad’s bodega. Ember and her father Útrí dár ì Bùrdì (Ronnie del Carmen), both came over from Fireland yes, this movie has firepeople who brought spicy food and strict ideas about honor and lineage with them where they were Bernie and Cinder until someone changed their names at Ellis Island. They’re close, even though he indoctrinates her with visions of taking over the shop once he retires. But she’s wondering if she actually wants it.
Ember doesn’t know what direction she’s supposed to take with her gifts being able to heat up a hot air balloon or mold glass between her fingers if any, other than those laid out by her beloved “ashfa.” Unable to manage her feelings, which can turn from red-hot into an eerie purple shade, Ember accidentally ruptures a pipe in her father’s store one day, that’s when city inspector Wade (Mamoudou Athie) comes rushing in. He’s been looking into the town’s old canal system for some time now, searching for a leak that keeps flooding Ember’s basement but threatens all of Firetown. Hoping to save her dad’s business from going under water literally or metaphorically she chases him down, and the two quickly join forces. It’s kind of an odd couple thing, because as far as Element City is concerned practically and parochially “elements don’t mix.” Ember could drown Wade out, while he could snuff her flame, but they’re forbidden to steam up because her father would never allow it. Which makes “Elemental” an interracial love story Pixar hasn’t yet told with human characters.
After that, one of the most cliche things about Pixar movies happens: they follow the formula. They start as complete opposites who can’t stand each other but eventually become good friends, then they have a falling out over a trivial misunderstanding before making up in an epic rescue where both are saved from certain doom and rekindle their love for one another. But as the plot’s breakneck chain reaction of events keeps Ember and Wade together, their relationship becomes the slight but sweet heart of the film, a welcome relief from all the mixed metaphors and faulty conceptual machinery that threaten to tear apart the inner logic of its story world (for example: why is it so weirdly unknown what will happen if Ember or Wade touches each other? In a city whose buildings are made out of ceramic and terracotta glass?).
Lewis gives Ember a playful tenderness that nicely sets off Athie’s bubbling affability as Wade, and both characters’ bodies are animated with thrilling elasticity hers flickering and then suddenly catching fire with feelings, heat rippling up; his fluid and transparent, prone to collapsing into puddles on the floor highlighting flexibility while flirting with abstraction.
But even its color scheme, shapes, and movements feel like they’re being held hostage by unimaginative storytelling. Only a few sequences stand out a trip to an underwater garden full of Vivisteria flowers, an aside into hand-drawn animation which tells a love story in minimal swirling lines but for these moments “Elemental” could be any other Pixar movie where glowing little blobs traverse photo-realistically rendered citiescapes, for all its speediness it never once takes us somewhere other than where we’d expect to end up.
There is nothing in “Elemental” that suggests the inspired aesthetic imagination behind such recent classics as “Finding Nemo” or “Wall-E,” save for composer Thomas Newman’s rich score. Drawing from an array of world musical traditions, it presents a more fully realized vision of cross-cultural exchange than the film’s own confused portrayal of immigrant communities. Aptly named “Elemental,” then, is hot enough minute by minute but vanishes from mind on contact.
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