ELEMENTAL is the 27th feature film from Pixar, and in many ways, it’s the most ambitious. Trying to tell a story with fire and water as your key characters would challenge any animator, even those who’ve imbued toys, cars, and even garbage compactors with amazingly anthropomorphic qualities. How do you place facial features on constantly moving elements? Would fire have a nose? A hairstyle? It’s confounding.
Compounding matters further is a story here so on-the-nose about its themes of inclusion and living in harmony that it starts to grate. The messages about global warming and pollution are painted broadly too. Finally, essaying its world where characters from all four elements co-exist is a complicated visual challenge. What do each element’s homes look like? Do they share communal parks? Can all the elements ride the same subway together? It’s a lot of intellectual ideas for one cartoon to hold. And while the film wants to be weighty in its social commentary and clever in its complex portrayal of the elements, it all starts to sag under such pretentiousness.
The core story of ELEMENTAL starts off reasonably well, with many charms abundantly clear. The two main characters represent a love story of polar opposites, sort of Maria and Tony in this colorful Pixar/Disney environment. Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) is fire, a temperamental young woman who’s also a working-class immigrant. She ends up falling for Wade Ripple (voiced by Mamoudou Athie), a water-based, government employee. Their worlds collide when some leaks start to flood the store owned by Ember’s parents. The store sells hot coals and other fiery treats like candy bars to the fire population and it’s a cheeky joke. Wade is sent to investigate the spillage and what he discovers compels him to report that the building is not up to code. That endangers the livelihood of Ember’s family, so she intervenes, trying to get Wade to change his report. A classic romcom relationship starts between them, moving from hate to love in just a matter of reels. And while they fall for each other, their adventures introduce us to the four elements – earth, wind, fire, and air – living together as cartoon characters in one urban sprawl.
With all that, you’d think Pixar/Disney would have included at least one Earth, Wind & Fire song, but nope, the filmmakers here are too preoccupied with other ideas. They want to comment strongly on prejudice and global warming, and in doing so, they end up pushing their fun love story to the (ahem) back burner. Granted, the Pixar film WALL-E, one of their very best, dealt with similar themes, but the humor was front in center of that film, as was its heart, represented by its trash compacter lead, a mechanical contraption in the mode of Charlie Chaplin. Here, the star-crossed lovers become increasingly difficult to invest in as they become more and more cranky with each other. All of their nagging about different worlds starts to drain away whatever humor the odd couple had going. At times, the film starts to feel more like a college dissertation than a family film.
Additionally, how the elements are represented on a number of fronts becomes questionable, even confounding. Why is land almost wholly represented by trees? Why is wind portrayed by clouds when they’re mostly made of water? The homes of the water characters appear to always be flooded, but wouldn’t it make more sense for them to live in giant pools? And why are the fire folks all consigned to blue collar immigrant cliche factory work? Wouldn’t fire be a natural for the food industry, fancy restaurants even, cooking entrees and making baked goods? Such questions of creativity, let alone geology, start to usurp the strength and simplicity of its “opposites attract” love story.
There is a lot to admire here, especially the vocal performances by Lewis and Athie, as well as the emotional score by Thomas Newman. The visuals are often eye-poppingly dense and detailed, and one of the best moments in any Pixar film finds the watery attendants of a sporting event here creating a literal wave in the stands. Hilarious!
Still, this was the first Pixar/Disney film that felt labored to me, straining to convey its message and convince in its world-building. Director Peter Sohn, and his fellow scripters John Hoberg, Kat Likkel, and Brenda Hsueh, want us to appreciate their story’s parallels to our modern world of tribalism and overt discrimination and question our increasingly fragile grasp on humanity. But too much of the movie had me questioning the geology and physics on display. Even make-believe about the elements could stand to be a bit more…well, grounded.
