(Pixar)
Disney, 2023. Rom-com, 102 minutes.
Grade: 1.5 out of 4
I had little to no desire to see Elemental in theaters, and I probably still would not have watched it had Disney not sent along the 4K steelbook. The reasons for this are several. First, the premise of water falling in love with fire sounded idiotic; I get the metaphor, obviously, as most humans over the age of 7 probably do. But fire and water literally destroy each other; it would be like me falling for a sex doll made of depleted uranium shells. Second, Pixar has gotten really boring and stale generally, and while Turning Red marked a nice turn away from their usual house style (which I’m sure they’ll claim they don’t have), Elemental looked like it might be a course correction right back. Thirdly, the only available press screening was on a Saturday morning, presumably to appease critics who are parents. I’m not one, and the sites I write for skew toward nonparents as well.
Fourthly, the lead character is named Wade, which is literally the worst possible name a person can have.*
Now, however, I have seen it, because I’d hate to be falsely judgmental, though it turns out I was at least partly right. Here’s the nicest thing I’ll say about the movie: it looks really beautiful. That may sound like an undersell, so let me be clear: it REALLY looks beautiful. It looked so good that I kept watching the whole thing despite its unengaging plot and rote character types. It’s one of the most expensive animated movies ever made, and all the money is on the screen. That said, while I will never deny any story projected on a big screen its definition as cinema, I imagine I felt a tiny bit like Martin Scorsese observing the Spider-Verse. Like Pixar’s Coco before it, which I am a rare naysayer on (don’t glorify toxic grandmothers!), it feels made for a theme park ride rather than a compelling romantic narrative.
Not that the best theme park rides don’t have narratives. They do. But they’re done in 5-10 minutes.
The filmmakers and crew have, for the benefit of anybody who’ll listen, explained many times that Elemental is based on the immigrant experience, growing up second-generation, misunderstanding your hard-working parents, and falling for someone from the new culture they don’t approve of at first. (That “at first” is a biggie, says I, who had to go no-contact with my mother after she’d had three years to accept my wife.) On the Blu-ray extras, they talk about it more, telling all their own stories. That’s great for them, but still not the same as fire and water. The movie begins with a couple who are literally made of fire, fleeing their home nation because of its devastating storms, and moving to a city that appears to be about 90% water. So, okay, that feels like somebody leaving Oklahoma because of the tornadoes, and moving to Fukushima. After it’s been irradiated.
The rules of the world make no sense. Sentient beings here are made up of either plants and soil, air, water, or fire. The fire people can burn the plants alive, and the water folks can extinguish fire. Yet the fire family we follow live in a house made of wood, though they also eat wood. And all their clothes are apparently flameproof. Other things they don’t automatically ignite include pamphlets given out at city hall. It’s completely arbitrary. Fireballs wouldn’t sit on inflatable pool chairs for long without a big pop happening. Without being too specific about the obvious ending in a movie with no surprises, the resolution is as arbitrary as everything else.
The fire people are essentially coded Asian, while the water people are like the dorkiest Caucasians ever (ironically, Wade is played by the decidedly non-white Mamoudou Athie). The air and earth characters barely figure in, so there’s no figuring them out yet. Wade, a major dork, meets fire girl Ember (Leah Lewis) when he finds himself sucked down a drain and into the leaky pipe in her store, which is leaky because she has a propensity for literally and figuratively flaming out and torching the room. Though there shouldn’t be any water in the pipes at all, an apparent mystery that the movie has no interest in doing anything with.
Wade actually works as a city inspector, and writes the store up for numerous code violations. Infuriated, Ember chases him all the way back to city hall to try and get a reprieve. As he feels bad – because he feels bad about everything and cries at the drop of a hat – Wade helps her go up the bureaucratic ladder to plead her case to successive superiors. Eventually, a reprieve is offered if they can figure out how the water is getting into Firetown’s pipes and stopping it. And for some reason, hothead Ember falls for the crybaby doofus.
Not that Disney hasn’t always been derivative and familiar, but boy, did I like this better when it was Zootopia, another movie about opposites attracting in a huge, futuristic-yet-segregated metropolis. It’s a better metaphor with animals – idealized tales of lions lying down with lambs date back at least to the Bible, or maybe Twilight. Water and fire generate steam, of course, but at both their own expenses. As relationship metaphor, that’s closer to the sex life of a praying mantis or black widow than humans.
There’s also a whole lot of clueless privilege in the story’s central metaphor. Ember is set to inherent her father’s store, a guaranteed money-maker, but she would rather take an internship at a glass factory where she can express herself artistically. I get it – everyone at Pixar kind of hit the lottery following their artistic dreams despite probable parental disapproval in some cases. But in the economy now, lots of us who have done the starving artist thing a while would love for a family business to fall into our laps and offer some sense of security, even if it is dull compared to making pretty objects. Read the room of your audience: jobs everywhere are drying up and cheaping out, and maybe protagonists who leave a sure thing behind actually aren’t good role models. Especially if their inattention to detail ends up ruining their entire section of town, and they never really take ownership of that fact.
Or maybe that’s just my dumb baggage. Nonetheless, everyone involved sure did make a sparkly, pretty object. I’ll call it cinema because it inherently is; I won’t call it great because it for damn sure ain’t. But the fan-shipping should be interesting. How do these two, uh, DO it?
Elemental is now available on 4K, Blu-ray, DVD, and digital.
(*I’m testing to see if fellow cinegod Wade Major actually reads my reviews all the way through.)