There's a meme that has been making the rounds online for nearly a decade, boiling down the formula for the majority of Pixar's animated movies to "What if X had feelings?," in which X could be cars (Cars), toys (Toy Story) or feelings themselves (Inside Out). Pixar's new movie Elemental sticks a little too close to that meme, with a story that could be pitched as "What if elements had feelings?" It may come across as Pixar Lite, then, but there's still plenty to enjoy in the gorgeously animated Elemental, even if the story is a little thin.
The elements do indeed have feelings, and they don't hesitate to express them. Embodiments of the four classical elements — earth, water, air, fire — live together in semi-harmony in the bustling Element City. All four emigrated from their original homelands, and the latest arrivals are the fire elements, who are still mostly confined to a neighborhood known as Fire Town and are subjected to a sanitized version of racial prejudice. Elemental is a somewhat belabored allegory for the immigrant experience in the United States, with a metaphor for ethnic groups that recalls the structure of Disney's Zootopia.
Director and co-writer Peter Sohn previously helmed 2015's The Good Dinosaur, one of Pixar's least successful movies, and he comes up with a similarly muddled story here, mushing together various immigrant cultures to create the background for the fire elements. Rather than any specific real-world nationality or ethnicity, Elemental is mainly about the shared experience of the generation gap between hard-working immigrant parents and their American-raised children.
As one of the earliest arrivals in Element City from Fire Land, Bernie Lumen (Ronnie del Carmen) takes pride in the business he and his wife, Cinder (Shila Ommi), built from the ground up, a corner store catering to other Fire Town residents. Bernie's greatest hope is for his daughter Ember (Leah Lewis) to take over the store one day, but Ember doesn't seem cut out for retail. When city inspector Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie), a water element, literally bursts into the store one day via a broken pipe, Ember starts to form a connection that her parents and the larger element society may not understand.
There's a rather haphazard subplot about municipal services that initially brings Ember and Wade together, but Elemental is mostly a love story, with a familiar star-crossed romance between two people whose families and communities might prefer to keep them apart. Bernie is on the verge of retirement and making a big show of handing the store over to Ember, while Wade comes from a supportive if slightly clueless upper-class family. Elemental offers a fairly superficial exploration of the complex issues it raises, and the deep-seated societal injustices behind the minor conflicts between Ember and Wade mostly get hand-waved away.
Still, Elemental is pleasant and easy to watch, with a pair of likable lead characters whose wide-eyed enthusiasm is infectious. Element City is an artistic wonder, a mix of design styles reflecting its four distinct residential groups. The world-building occasionally threatens to overwhelm the narrative, and some of the strained analogs for equivalent human products and institutions invite unfortunate comparisons to last year's clumsy Apple TV+ animated movie Luck, from former Pixar boss John Lasseter.
Elemental is more imaginative and emotionally engaging than Luck, but it still has a tendency to lose sight of its characters amid the background details. Those background details are always dazzling, and when they serve the story rather than pushing it aside, Elemental evokes a more subdued version of the feelings that made its Pixar predecessors connect so strongly with audiences. ♦
ELEMENTAL
