It’s long been a joke that Pixar will make movies anthropomorphizing anything just to show they can. Starting out the gate with Toy Story it makes some sense that kind of a creative instinct would just inhabit their DNA; they made the bug movie, the monster movie, the fish movie, but it was the car movie where I first remember it starting to get a bit ridiculous. For a little while the company avoided the gimmick in favour of more inspired original ideas like Ratatouille, WALL-E, and Up, but then Pete Docter (now Pixar CCO) came back to it with the extremely out-there idea of anthropomorphizing human emotions. It wound up working though, even being one of Pixar’s best movies, and it set the stage eight years later for this comparably abstract movie concept about living elements of nature.
And boy did we make fun of it! In fairness, the generic trailer with extreme emphasis on the gimmick didn’t do it any favours, but even beside that, Elemental seemed to be the laziest attempt at this format yet -an apparent conceptual mash-up of Inside Out and Zootopia tied together by the most rudimentary ‘opposites attract’ metaphor conceived. And while Pixar has a good track record even with these kinds of overly broad ideas, some of their creative choices lately have tempered confidence.
Pixar has changed, and indeed Elemental does not explore its concept with the finesse and imagination of similar movies past. It is much too ordinary, especially in its setting and plot. But I forget that these gimmick movies always functioned at least in part for the animators to experiment with different visuals, textures and tricks -and that is on display exceptionally in this movie, which (forgetting for a moment it’s sheer misfortune to open so close to Across the Spider-Verse) is one of Pixar’s more stunning entries of the last several years.
The movie concerns a civilization of element people living in a world that logically breaks down if you think about it intuitively for more than a minute (the elements that these people are made of also exist independently for an example of how structurally confused it all is). In a New York pastiche called Element City, Ember (Leah Lewis) is the daughter of immigrant fire shop owners, expected to inherit the business once they retire. She crosses paths with a water person city inspector Wade (Mamoudou Athie) when it’s revealed the business is being threatened by larger city plumbing issues and they work together to save it from being shut down, while also beginning an unlikely romance.
I feel that part of the reason for the dull setting and poorer world-building was to emphasize the heavy immigration commentary that seems to be a lynchpin theme and dominates large portions of the movie. And from the moment Ember’s parents arrive at the Ellis Island analogue and are made to change their names, it is extremely unsubtle and lacking in nuance. While there are some pretty new and solid allegories once in a while in how the world of Element City is structurally designed to marginalize fire people, for the most part the movie doesn’t depict the immigrant or racialized experience in any compelling way –preferring instead to looking at other movie’s portraits and trading in stereotypes. These stereotypes are somewhat vaguely directed, the fire people and their culture coded as variously Italian, Russian Jewish, Latine, Indian, and East Asian –the result of writers attempting to create a distinct culture while still making it recognizably ‘immigrant’ to American shorthand. By now both the stubborn, overbearing dad and the first generation child wanting to go their own way are clichés of the immigrant narrative, and while I appreciate Elemental’s focus on Ember’s guilt complex in relation to this, it still lacks sufficient distinction and the desire to more thoughtfully explore its issues.
What’s weird is that the aspect of the movie that looked the most tedious, the rom-com, is honestly much stronger than the immigrant business plot. In fact the movie should have honed in more exclusively on that as not only the place for some of the sharpest animation expression but also an unexpected narrative sweetness. Ember and Wade’s relationship, for the most part, is played with a soft touch -an organic chemistry developing in spite of some broad character flaws (his frequent tendency towards interminable crying the staunchest of them). But there is also something endearing to that muchness between them, the heightened emotionality of both his sensitivity and her anger issues -a regular point of her expected character growth. It reminds me a lot of Moonstruck, which was cited by director Peter Sohn (only his second Pixar feature and far better than The Good Dinosaur) as an influence. That same dynamic of gut attraction is at play here. And while the dialogue can be somewhat stilted between them, the script draws them well enough in relation to their effect on each other -Ember’s perspective on Wade and Wade’s free-spirit on Ember- that there’s character beyond simply the schtick of their opposing elemental make-up.
It also must be said that they are drawn in a more literal sense impeccably. The movie is very nicely animated, with consideration for how the element people of this world move and evolve within it. But nowhere does it stand out more interestingly than in the designs of Ember and her family, with the fragility of their body, the two-dimensional style to their features, and the ways their form fluctuates in relation to mood (looking a more diminished flame when sad, a hot oven burner when angry). Every moment they’re on screen is thrilling to watch from an animation standpoint. Part of the inspiration here is almost certainly in the look and expression of Calcifer from Howl’s Moving Castle -indeed it seems like ever since Pete Docter took over, Pixar has more and more openly imitated Studio Ghibli -at least in stylistic designs. We see this too in Wade and his family, especially in the accentuation of their emotional outbursts (the flood of tears is a direct anime trait). But it’s also clear that the animators looked to these real elements closely in their efforts to contain them and present them in anthropomorphic terms. What separates Wade from say, the similar water-based aliens from Futurama, is the way his water moves and flows, creating an elastic but tangible essence, and his reflective aspect -used to great effect more than a few times. The animators find that necessary beauty in bringing together water and fire in evocative, sometimes even impressionistic ways. The first moment Ember and Wade touch, an act that in the film’s best use of metaphor can only be accomplished by finding a perfect push-and-pull harmony between them, captures the required gravity with a tender grace. And there are a handful of moments that indulge in a like visual romantic splendour that only makes me wish the whole film had the courage to be as abstract and elegant. String together several of these scenes, cut out the dialogue and enhance the music, and you’ve got a lovely little Fantasia sequence.
Elemental is a movie with some strong visual-emotional instincts, but it clouds them in an environment and in plotting that doesn’t do them justice. The movie has its other charms in the voice acting and some of the visual jokes (the less said about the scripted ones the better), though it can’t help but feel overall like a concept boxed in by its context. Still, it’s certainly more indicative of what Pixar ought to be doing right now in lieu of Lightyear and a recently announced Toy Story 5. Elemental at the very least, has a spark of inspiration and is worth engaging with.
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