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| Images courtesy of PIXAR |
Among the different animation studios, Pixar has been most adept at world-building and creating compelling characters that fit into those worlds. From a world inhabited by sentient cars to the inside of an eleven-year-old’s mind, there are few intriguing premises they have missed. The newest offering from Disney-Pixar is Elemental, a love story set in a world of anthropomorphic natural elements – fire, water, earth and air – who, for obvious reasons, tend not to mix too much. There are clear parallels to immigration and racism, but the film doesn’t go deep with these connections to real life. Instead, it focuses on a love story – which makes it almost dull in its banality.
Ember Lumen (voiced by Leah Lewis) is the daughter of immigrant fire people with a rich cultural heritage who left Fire Land to start a new life in Element City. Her father, Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen) dreams of passing on management of his sundries shop to Ember “when she’s ready”, but deep inside, she doesn’t share this dream. A plumbing accident occurs and she meets Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie), a sensitive city inspector, and the emotional journey begins as Ember is faced with the possible closure of her father’s shop, and she and Wade begin falling in love as they try to save it.
Conceptually and visually, this film is beautifully rendered and clever, with plenty of visual gags surrounding the different types of elementals and the sections of city they call home. But digging into the story, and many of the details, it’s simply disappointing that more time was not spent in this creative world. The love story between Ember and Wade is meant to be dramatic – these are two people who are afraid to even touch one another – but it falls flat, and neither of the two main characters are particularly compelling on their own. Wade spends half of the film crying over nothing, and Ember hides her true feelings under a veneer of nearly constant anger, making both one-note and disappointingly shallow. It’s hard to care what happens to them, and as a result, the story falls flat.
So much of the film relies on the love story that it’s also difficult to know what the film’s intended audience is. It doesn’t feel like a “family” film; small children will undoubtedly enjoy the physical world and design jokes that litter the movie, particularly the scenes that take place in the city, but likely aren’t going to be invested in a half-baked romance that forces two very different characters together for the sake of a lesson. Since Pixar’s films are all about heart, it’s not surprising that Elemental spends so much of its time on the core relationship, but unfortunately, since it ignores so many other more interesting facets of its newest world, the entire film is substandard.
Elemental is not a terrible film, but it doesn’t
hold up to what the studio is capable of. It takes a brilliant conceptual idea
and stretches it to tell a largely uninteresting, and sometimes outright
confusing, story about two people meeting and falling in love. That one is a
fire elemental and the other a water doesn’t really seem to add much to that.
One hopes that Pixar learns from this and spends more time in the kinds of
worlds we know they are capable of creating, and less time trying to convince
its audience that their outlandish characters are just like us.
-Dana Culling