Elemental Review: Sacrificing Story for Symbolism and Sentimentality

Throughout the history of Pixar, the movies that have made the biggest impact on audiences are ones that deliver compelling characters and an exciting storyline. The relatively straightforward adventures like Toy Story, The Incredibles, and Finding Nemo might not have deeper emotional significance than their plots, but the ways in which these stories are told are inventive and exciting, winning over audiences of all ages. In more recent years, movies like Soul, Luca, and Turning Red have not only managed to deliver engaging narratives in their own right, but also bring with them deeper emotional resonance, helping young and old viewers alike cope with death, personal identity, and transitioning out of being a kid. Elemental, the latest effort from Pixar, fails to offer viewers anything exciting either on the surface or deeper within its story, never finding the balance of literal and metaphorical messages, and it never quite figures out what kind of movie it wants to be.

Taking place in Element City, the residents are anthropomorphized representations of fire, water, land, and air. The fiery Ember (Leah Lewis) has a chance encounter with the watery Wade (Mamoudou Athie) that threatens to shut down her family’s store. Realizing what’s at stake, the pair try to find an alternate solution to the situation, only to fall for one another along the way, even if it means having to overcome the challenges that uniting the worlds of fire and water bring with it.

In retrospect, it seems impossibly broad to think that a story about overcoming cultural obstacles would be reduced to the symbolism of fire and water, but with that in mind, it then makes sense that the entire storyline then faced so many struggles when attempting to tell such a story. Unlike so many other successful Pixar movies, the film just never seems to realize whether it wants to deliver a surface-level storyline or convey something deeper about the human condition, with the shift from one sequence to another making for a jarring and frustrating experience.

From the opening scenes of the movie, in which we see Ember’s parents, Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen) and Cinder (Shila Ommi), arriving in this new city and suffer pushback from its other elemental residents, it’s clear that the story will be attempting to convey themes of the immigrant experience. Whether it’s because the characters are literally on fire, threatening to damage the world around them and upending the status quo of their surroundings, or the more figurative differences between these fire characters, the concept has promise in which it shows the pushback of societies at the introduction of any “others.” Seeing Bernie and Cinder grow both wary of any outsiders to their community and protective over their child is something that does work for the story, as it’s difficult to deduce from one scene to the next whether their methods come from a place of love or anger.

Similarly, as the story progresses and Ember and Wade both meet one another’s parents, there are sequences that work in which Wade’s family is impressed with how well Ember speaks (who points out that it’s because she grew up speaking the same language as the rest of the city) and, after noticing her artistic abilities, are quick to offer her an opportunity that she never could have dreamed of. Conversely, Bernie doesn’t approve of Wade and the story finds a relatively subtle way to showcase the challenges of something as simple as acclimating to the hot food that another culture might eat that someone isn’t accustomed to. These are big and bold swings for a Pixar movie to take, as it uses the elements to showcase the impact of xenophobia, though whenever it starts to feel like an educational special, it then pivots to embrace the more lighthearted elements of a typical animated adventure.

What really holds the movie back is that neither Ember nor Wade are particularly compelling characters, with their quest together not doing much to make the other more entertaining. Their initial meeting takes them on a journey through Element City’s bureaucratic system in hopes of resolving a plumbing issue, with this mission neither being entertaining to watch unfold nor bringing any overall significance to main story, other than out of narrative obligation. The characters needed to be brought together, they needed to have an encounter that highlighted their differences, and there needed to be a third-act disaster to help everyone overcome those differences. It’s not that the characters themselves are disasters, just that neither offer much on their own for audiences to connect with, and things don’t get any better when they team up with one another, especially when so many scenes and sequences feel like sidequests as opposed to anything imperative to either of their journeys.

Making that lack of charm with each of the characters more evident is the fact that Elemental is essentially a romantic comedy; two characters with countless differences from disparate worlds have a meet cute and, despite these hurdles, prove to be stronger together than they are individually. In a live-action project in a similar genre, you can potentially rely on the charisma of lead performers to help draw in the audience, which is largely absent in the transition to animation. By both having to make the project accessible enough for kids and by trying to tackle xenophobia, it fails to offer the necessary nuances to deliver a love story about overcoming the obstacles that stand in their way. Add to that the superfluous threats to Element City itself, and you get an experience that feels like it has many promising bullet points but one whose connective tissue failed to ever unite all of these elements.

From a visual standpoint, Elemental also fails to bring anything new to the table, and while it might be a relatively competent experience, it falls short of what Pixar fans have come to expect from the studio’s ambitious storytelling techniques. The only bright spot is the animation style of the fire characters themselves, as the ways in which their burning nature is rendered feel genuinely stylized, but the rest of the elements and the worlds they inhabit look like they could have been pulled from virtually any other animated movie. It ultimately feels like all of the creative energy of Pixar was put into the fire characters and, by the time it came to developing the rest of the world, the studio was either out of ideas, out of time, or both.

Back in 2015, Pixar delivered the impressive Inside Out, breaking down emotional parts for audiences and showcasing just how messy feelings could get in a nuanced and sophisticated way. Pixar’s next release, The Good Dinosaur, wasn’t so much a failure so much as it didn’t match the same successes of Inside Out. Both The Good Dinosaur and Elemental were directed and conceived of by Peter Sohn, and they each exhibit storytelling and visual promise that never get realized in fulfilling ways. Given that audiences have more than two dozen Pixar films to pick from when it comes to choosing their favorite, Elemental is sure to find its fans, especially viewers who can more directly relate to the cultural struggles that the characters face with integrating into a new community. While its ambitions might be admiral, the tonal shifts from one scene to the next, underwhelming characters, and arbitrary storyline all fail to make for a memorable experience, as Elemental never becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Rating: 2 out of 5

Elemental lands in theaters on June 16th.