I’ve watched nearly every Pixar movie. I have some I entirely adore and will happily rewatch whenever the opportunity presents. The others I still enjoy but they don’t have an ongoing impact on my life. Elemental is firmly in the second category. Its charm and inventive physical humor kept me delighted, and its role as a modern fable about immigration and racism makes it worth watching, but its story had inconsistent pacing with confusing characterization.
Elemental is a compendium of Pixar’s animation abilities. Each of their first several movies was paired with a breakthrough in believable animation, with the clever shading of A Bug’s Life, the hair and fur throughout Monsters, Inc. and mesmerizing underwater motion in Finding Nemo. A movie like Elemental gives their animators an opportunity to show off by capturing difficult, unique motion—how do you clearly represent the four “elements” present in the movie?—but forcing them to interact. Every scene where Ember’s heat boils the surface of water is phenomenal. The jiggling motion of Wade and his water-based brethren feels natural. If you don’t appreciate the technical progress and achievment displayed in this movie, I might recommend you go watch any Pixar movie from their first ten years of existence to understand how far they’ve come.
The next layer of enjoyment is the entire conceit of the movie. Four groups of people, each representing a different element—water, air, earth, and fire—live in a big city fittingly named “Element City”. At some point the decision was made to throw any attempt at subtlety out the window. The fire people come from “Fire Land”. When introducing Element City, we see the water people were the “first wave”. Cue a sequence of puns that remains unbroken throughout the movie, from the “Kiss Me, I’m Firish” shirt to the “Hot Logs” cart. It even invaded the dialogue in an element-agnostic way, when the barely-pubescent earth boy Claude says: “Would it take an act of God, or an act of Claude?”
Everyone will take this in-your-face silliness differently. I was won over by its consistency and transparency, smiling at each new joke that they worked in. Their density was impressive, and essentially all of them were tasteful. They all lie firmly on the line that separates Pixar from Dreamworks.
The downside of those jokes was that I ended the movie feeling that they had a fun idea that a bunch of people kept riffing on, then the animators realized how much of a blast they’d have building it all out, and somewhere in that excitement the story was lost. I believe there was a story they wanted to tell about immigration, but this movie felt more like an extended fable meant to teach extremely young children about discrimination. It lacked a certain depth that the best Pixar movies have, where you’re forced to confront an idea from a unique perspective. Elemental felt like a story I’ve seen dozens of times, but with a framing device that offered an exciting bit of animation.
In particular, the characters lacked a flow of change that felt natural. They were mostly one-dimensional, with sudden flips of opinion that didn’t feel entirely earned. I don’t think I fully got to know any characters other than Wade, but even he seemed inconsistent. I don’t believe in his paper-pushing, citation-writing origin in the movie given who he as, so consistently, for the remainder of the film. They also did not use Ember to her full potential. I was waiting for the moment where she channeled her rage to do something miraculous and powerful–going “full purple” for a good reason. It showed some growth and understanding for her to get Wade to cry at the end, but it would have been more effecting had she come up with her own words to accomplish that feat.
Beyond that, I have so many questions about the dysfunction of Element city. Why was this hole in a set of doors(?) that would allow water through not noticed? Why was it up to two random folks to seal that hole? Who even runs this town? If you’re going to introduce bureaucracy, you have to expect me to be curious how it works.
I don’t regret my time watching Elemental. It had fun and cute moments, but unlike many great Pixar movies, I never felt tears coming on. I didn’t feel much of anything other than pleasure at spotting a new pun in the background, or admiration for the animation. At this point, it’s an expected okay film from Pixar after the existential Soul and nearly perfect Luca. I don’t think Pixar can make a truly bad movie by any means, but they simply aren’t able to capture a little bit of magic in every film.