Flasz On Film

Following their now well-established methodology of anthropomorphizing unique concepts and packaging them into what-if-x-had-feelings narrative constructs, Elemental – Pixar’s newest baby – imagines a world where natural elements have lives of their own. However, my worry is that once the storytellers settled on the gimmick, its mechanics and perhaps how it would superficially relate to our lives, they let the movie run in neutral powered by inertia and good intentions. And the problem is that in a world where Luca and Soul exist as immediate points of comparison, it just might not be enough for this movie to stand out.  

In fact, once you settle into the story, you might realize it is incredibly familiar and its unique selling point lies squarely within the parameters of the elemental gimmick. We are introduced to Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis), who is a fire elemental. She lives together with her parents in Fire Town, an immigrant suburb of Elemental City. She helps her hard-working dad Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen) run his shop and slowly prepares to take over the business, which she innately feels is not her desired path in life. However, she does not want to disappoint her father, or make her family feel she is not interested in carrying on her cultural legacy.  

Unfortunately, disappoint her family is what she’s on her way to do because one day she nearly floods the shop (and water and fire don’t mix, as we are told), which leads her to meet Wade (voiced by Mamoudou Athie), a leak inspector who then reports her dad’s shop to the authorities, which he immediately regrets. However, it is later agreed that if the two, Ember and Wade, find where suspicious water leaks plaguing Fire Town are coming from and stop them from happening, all will be forgiven. This naturally leads the two to spend more time together, which is all they need to realize that not only their cultural differences are what make people interesting, but also that water and fire can mix after all, and that love can flourish in the unlikeliest places. 

Naturally, there’s more because Elemental wastes no opportunity to flex Pixar’s creative muscles, which are trained to creatively deploy the central gimmick at hand in the context of amusing miniature scenarios and ready-made concepts. Thus, we can immediately pick out that the very idea of asking what if natural elements had feelings is an invitation to map a wholesale metaphorical interpretation onto it, in which the elements are stand-ins for different cultures and the idea of living together in Element City is a reflection of how these disparate cultures found themselves in a melting pot megalopolis, akin to New York City. In fact, the very beginning of the film makes this connection incredibly obvious as it re-imagines the famous beginning of The Godfather Part II in which Vito is given a surname Corleone because he misunderstood the customs officer and told him where he was from instead of what his name was. Remember Amerigo Bonasera who was probably named as such because he opened with ‘good evening, America’? It’s not an accident that fire elementals are called Bernie and Ember and that the water one is called Wade. In fact, it’s a social commentary hiding underneath the cuteness of Pixar’s deployment of their quirky ideation.  

This entire movie is a collection of many more such observations engineered to reflect a modern reality to an extent. It is clearly meant to send a powerful message about the fractured state of the American society specifically and more broadly about any other Western society. The filmmakers utilize extremely accessible stereotypes to paint these nuanced concepts with rather broad strokes that just about ride the line between cute and inappropriate. And they achieve this balance by remaining ambiguous enough that it is rather hard to map which cultures exactly each of the different elemental types are supposed to be avatars for. You can just about barely pick out that fire elementals are a hybrid of Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, South American and Far Eastern tropes all smelted into a hot-blooded composite. Equally, you can surmise that water elementals are supposed to correspond to first-wave immigrants who have been there for so long they have effectively re-shaped Element City to suit their own needs ahead of everyone else. They are essentially stand-ins for “The White Man”.  

Consequently, you are free to cherry-pick elements of this movie and interpret them as a functional metaphor commenting on the immigrant experience, xenophobia, racial segregation and class-based subjugation of less-endowed parts of society by those benefitting from generations-worth of compounded privilege. However, this is not all that Elemental wants to have a go at. The movie also aspires to use its central mechanic as a vehicle to tell an archetypal story of young forbidden love, a less tragic second cousin of Romeo and Juliet where Ember and Wade – two elementals from tribes who are thought to be incompatible; after all, water and fire do not mix, did you forget? – find each other and learn to look past the culturally imposed boundaries that have unjustly governed any interactions between their cultures.  

But wait! There’s more! In addition to all of that, Elemental also attempts to grapple with fundamental and emotionally impactful aspects of the human condition – the woes of continuing your cultural lineage, taking care of your parents, living up to their expectations, all in the context of a family displaced to a faraway land where they have nobody to help them. This is probably the most resonant aspect of the entire film, to be completely honest, though the problem is that the narrative is perhaps not built to capitalize on it to its fullest extent. In fact, I am forced to report that the movie does not execute on any of these distinct avenues of thematic exploration to a satisfying degree and instead flip-flops between them while attempting to stick to an archetypal narrative backbone involving a crisis and a basic interpretation of a hero’s journey trope… almost as though it bit more than it could chew.  

It is almost amusingly ironic if you think that a film whose take-home message relates to the idea of bringing disparate cultures together under one roof to show they could not only co-exist but thrive on the back of their variety would struggle to keep a lid over top of its own narrative and thematic strands – its own equivalent of elemental microcultures. It is honestly fascinating to observe! Through its sheer lack of focus or determination to commit to either of these avenues, each of which would have likely yielded a much more powerful movie as a result, Elemental undoes itself as quickly and painfully as it is humanly possible. I suppose the filmmakers may have been fully aware of the simple fact that if they had committed to the theme of acceptance of otherness, they would have effectively retraced the steps of Luca. If they had leaned into the love story, they’d equally re-told any of a number of Disney Princess narrative tropes, and if they had instead committed to the notions of keeping a parental heritage alive, they’d land rather close to Encanto. And Moana. And Raya and the Last Dragon. And… you pick another one. There’s plenty more to choose from on Disney Plus. 

They knew that any of these little stories had been done to death and maybe wanted to see what would come out if they made a collage out of a handful of them. Not that it’s impossible. It probably is. But is a Pixar animation that also heavily relies on an archetypal narrative backbone to carry the movie the best way to go about it? Even if it is, I believe this could have been done a bit more diligently and subtly because Elemental as a film-going experience is at best mediocre. In fact, it’s almost impossible to see who it is for. It’s most assuredly not for kids, because they’ll be bored to death once they get over the visuals… especially if they remember how much of a fun time they had watching The Super Mario Bros. Movie just a few short months earlier. It is also not for adults, really. Elemental is a film for nobody because by virtue of its own lack of conviction, it chooses to fester in the twilight zone between family friendly cuteness and socially informed finger-wagging.  

It is, quite frankly, a bit of a mess that just cannot be fully salvaged with the use of Pixar’s puppy dog eyes. The gimmick, which initially looks quite inventive, quickly either becomes stale or simply ends up overshadowed by the cacophony of thematic voices all fighting over the soap box. Sure, the animation is predictably beautiful, colourful and vivid but that’s old news at this point. I’d be more surprised if Pixar ever turned in a movie that looks drab and washed out. And it would probably be seen as an artistic choice worth scratching your head over, too.  

However, as far as Elemental is concerned, it is a big bowl of disappointment full of competing flavours and ideas that simply don’t know how to co-exist. Maybe the filmmakers should have stopped for a second and listened to their own characters, who spent nearly two hours trying to figure out how to live together and love each other without endangering one another’s existence, because all throughout the movie I wished I could just tune out at least one of these themes… hoping this cacophony of shouting and wrestling for attention would suddenly turn into something that looks vaguely coherent, choreographed and… pleasant.

Therefore, I can only recommend Elemental to Pixar completists and those who find it sufficient when Pixar storytellers entertain them with their signature mechanics alone. But if you want to get more out of these thematic journeys Elemental tries to juggle so haphazardly, just watch Luca. Watch Moana. Watch Soul. And if you want to watch a movie that comes close to juggling all those aspects – the immigrant experience, the idea of laying down your roots on foreign soil and keeping your cultural identity, living up to your parents’ expectations and so on – just watch Minari.