Pixar Studios found a sweet spot in 1995 with Toy Story, perfecting the formula for appealing to children as well as adults. Their computer-animated productions took absurd premises—sentient playthings, lost fish, talking cars, a family of superheroes, a rat who’s a gourmet chef—and spun them into stories that were both goofily entertaining and emotionally resonant. Toy Story 3, in particular, with its embrace-of-death moment in the third act, packed a harder punch than most adult dramas. For a couple of decades, the studio seemed not to miss, producing one masterpiece after another, with box office success accompanying critical acclaim. That bloom seemed to fade in recent years, as middling sequels diluted the charm of the originals and new productions failed to resonate as much with audiences. Still, Pixar continues to grapple with abstract ideas that defy easy translation to the screen—the personification of human emotion, the nature of death itself—and now the filmmakers, in Elemental, have taken on the most basic building blocks of the natural world: fire, water, earth and air. The result is a thoroughly Pixaresque entertainment: gorgeous to look at and easy to enjoy, but slightly cloying and frustratingly simple in its through-line to resolution.
Directed by Peter Sohn and written by John Hoberg, Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh, the story adds a fresh ingredient to the studio’s usual toolbox of cute characters, action set pieces and family dynamics: romance. It’s as chaste as can be—this is a kid’s movie, after all—but the romantic tension between the principal characters serves as the main driver of the plot. Ember (Leah Lewis) is the only daughter of hardworking parents who emigrated from Fireland before she was born. They’re a family of flames, living in a fiery neighborhood in a teeming metropolis. Wade (Mamoudou Athie) is a big, jolly blob of water from a privileged family of other watery folks who live in a high-rise that glitters with waterfalls. The differences between them are, well, elemental. He could douse her from existence, and she could evaporate him. It’s the timeworn rom-com plot of opposites attracting, but the filmmakers have so much fun with sight gags and dad jokes that the set-up charms more than it clunks.
There’s a brazenness to the sincerity of the film’s symbolism, with Ember and Wade’s backgrounds clearly representing different ethnicities and social classes. The other denizens of the city are earthen clods and walking shrubs, rounding out the wheel of elements. While the city is clearly built for liquid comfort and success, enclaves of other elements abound in a cartoony simplification of most large American cities. Human stereotypes are studiously avoided, but the elements tend to behave like you’d expect: the fire people are spicy and hot-headed, and the watery ones go with the flow when not gushing with tears. That’s something of a problem when it comes to the central romance. While Ember is shown to be a person of complexity and inner turmoil, struggling for independence from her parents’ wishes, there’s not much that defines Wade’s personality beyond his natural instinct to ebb and flow. He always says the right thing at the right time, and his intentions are always presented as entirely sincere and selfless. He’s a bland choice because there’s never any doubt that Wade is perfect for Ember, as long as she chooses to be with him. It’s the downfall of many rom-coms, sapping the love story of any sense of emotional risk.
The larger message of the film, however, is beautifully suggested by the parallels between the elements and their ethnic analogues in the real world. The fire people are clearly coded as Asian, both in the rendering of the characters and in the particulars of their circumstances: arriving via boat from the old country and establishing a corner bodega that serves as a community hub for other fire people, who all agree on the value of preserving the traditional flame from back home. The joys and hardships of this family are subtly and sensitively observed, while the conflicts they encounter as they variously assimilate and resist assimilation are the stories of countless new and aspiring Americans every day. The film perfectly captures the awkwardness of well-meaning parents who, while not saying the wrong things to people from other cultural backgrounds, somehow manage to not say the right ones either. The scene where Ember is introduced to Wade’s family is hilariously cringey as Wade’s mother, Brook (Catherine O’Hara), desperately tries to give her smoldering visitor a watery welcome that ends up fizzling.
Pixar’s films have always been visually inventive in ways that transcend the technology used to render the images. Even their oldest films stand as classics; the relative primitiveness of the graphics saps none of the appeal. What made Finding Nemo in particular so transporting was that the animation depicted something that looked eerily like the real world in all its unknowable mystery. Elemental, despite being the most gorgeous-looking Pixar production to date, doesn’t quite match that sense of wonder because it depicts a world that’s at a symbolic remove from the real one.
Still, it’s a visual symphony of contrasts: glowing orange fusing with liquid blue, a whole cityscape of elemental ecology where the very things that sustain some people present mortal threats to others. And yet everyone is shown to live in what passes for harmony, even if some have more harmony than others. The word “America” appears nowhere in the film, and yet it’s clearly that kind of dream that animates Ember’s desire to forge her own path beyond her father’s bodega. Wade helps her on that journey, because of course he does, but the real story is about Ember learning to both modulate and accept her fundamental nature. We can’t change who we are, but we can be better versions of ourselves. That’s a nuanced message to embed in a story of stark contrasts, proving that Pixar still has some spark left.
Photo courtesy of Disney/Pixar
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