Burn it all down
We are living in a golden age of movies for children that present metaphorical parables about racism, in which the metaphor is horrendously bad and probably makes the pro-racism argument more effectively than the anti-racism argument. Not a good thing to have a golden age of. But anyway, here were are with the 27th feature film by Pixar Animation Studios, Elemental, which is built primarily around a central metaphor that is so profoundly unwieldy and misguided that I can't fathom how it got past the pitch stage: so, immigrants. What if immigrants were people who, if they touched you, you would die? Like, they just so much as brushed against you accidentally, you would die a horrible, painful death? And conversely, what if everything about society was constituted such that if the members of the immigrant community ever left their ghetto, very nearly every single surface was manufactured from a material that would kill them if they came into contact with it? So much so that the city government was obliged to remove that ghetto from the city's infrastructural grid simply to avoid even the possibility that this contact might happen? In this world, we would all agree that it would be very important for the immigrant minority and the native-born majority to commingle as much as possible, right?
Even by the standards the Walt Disney Corporation began setting themselves with 2016's similarly batshit Zootopia ("there is a particular race that is genetically hard-wired to be murderous, savage beasts, and they might snap back into their horrific carnivorous ways with no warning if even the smallest thing goes slightly wrong. Being biased against these people is unjustifiable"), this is just wrong, presenting the idea that different ethnic groups are basically different species, and it is the inherent nature of each species to destroy at least one of the others, building many gags and narrative conflicts that call direct attention to the incomprehensible dangers that would attain from attempting to combine the needs of these different species, and then acting like only a weirdo would care. It's the most immediately apparent way that the Elemental story and screenplay (which has four different credited authors, let alone the many people in the studio who had to okay this along the way) are just flat-out broken: it is, not only for the incredible weakness of its central metaphor, the most unsound script that Pixar has ever turned into a feature film. This was a studio that once upon a time made one of its fundamental strengths the exploration of complex, fully-realized worlds: bug worlds, monster worlds, fish worlds, car worlds, Scotland. The Pixar golden age is far enough in the past that it's not worth hoping for it to come back any time soon, but even so, Elemental is just horrifically bad at world-building; its concept is pure nonsense right from the world go. So, the four classical elements - air, fire, water, earth - what if those were, like, people, right? People made of fire, people made of water, people made of clouds, people made of... dirt, I think, though their visual representation is all about the plants growing out of them in what is inconsistently represented as hair. At one point, an earth couple is kinkily plucking apples off each other when they think nobody is watching - a horrible gag that the studio is so proud of that it was featured in the trailers - and this would be, I guess, the equivalent of lovers getting each other off by chewing on one another's pubes. But okay, fire people, water people, cloud people (who are, in theory, an ascended version of the water people, but the film doesn't notice this), dirt people. Let us say that a fire person and a water person fell in love. Don't you think things between them would get pretty, heh heh, steamy? That's it, that's the whole of the world-building.
There are a lot of holes there, but let's spot them that. "What if elements had feelings?" had no chance of feeling like anything other than Pixar making a parody of itself, but sometimes that can work out. That is, however, a logline, not a story, and the story to Elemental is just... awful. There's a whole city that is built around the water, cloud, and dirt people, built primarily around water (but, I guess, water with a lowercase-w rather than Water with a capital-W, since it mostly doesn't seem to be sentient: even the public transit is some kind of combination of water-based monorail, sort of like if Walt Disney had decided that it's a small world was the future of transportation technology instead of the PeopleMover. The fire people, meanwhile, have only lived here for apparently two or three generations, and live together on the outskirts of town, where they cannot be drowned by the omnipresent water, nor can they inadvertently murder the dirt people. And we have met no characters and not yet had the inkling of a narrative, and I already have so many questions. What is the backstory of this world? If there are, and have always been, four population who are also the elements, surely they've all known this for many centuries? I will not indulge myself in a rant - if I did that, there'd be no end to it, and I'd ultimately have a 4000-word review that's nothing but nitpicking. Suffice it to say that the world Elemental presents is immediately unpersuasive and feels under-conceived in ways that make it terribly unappealing to want to learn more about it. And to overcome this, the film basically straight-up cheats, by giving us many long, loving tracking shots of the water/air/earth part of town, and building gag after gag after gag around those elements, but leaving the fire people represented basically just by the protagonist, her parents, one room in a a store, and a few signage gags.
The protagonist in question is one Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis) whose parents Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen, a Pixar story artist being given his first meaty voice role) and Cinder (Shila Ommi) emigrated from Fire Land after an unexplained catastrophe, while Cinder was pregnant. As one of the first fire people in Element City, Bernie's business catering to the needs of fire people made him a center of the community, and now, a couple of decades on, he's gearing up to retire and hand his beloved shop to Ember. Only she has a tendency to get very angry at very little provocation - she's hot-tempered, you could say! - and one day she explodes so hard that she knocks the pipes lose in the shop's basement, spraying water all over. Later, an air-person City Works administrator named Gale (Wendi McLendon-Covey) will express shock that this happened, given that the water to the fire neighborhood was shut off to avoid just such a potentially deadly occurrence. Impressively, despite this one specific line of dialogue being what launches the whole story into movement, we never actually get an explanation for what happened. Back in the present, a portion of the water forms itself into the body of Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie), a plumbing inspector who was chasing a leak. Again, this gets basically dropped - the "explanation" involves a flood on surface streets, not anything to do with the city's plumbing infrastructure. To be clear, Elemental absolutely, no two ways about it, thinks that it has satisfyingly explained all of this. The most charitable thing I can come up with is that none of the writers have even the most superficial concept of how civic engineering works.
Long story short: Wade writes Ember up for a whole host of code violations, but then takes pity on her when she appeals to his emotions - he cries easily, because he's water, you see. So he convinces Gale to make a deal that if he and Ember can track down the source of the leak, all those violations will be memory-holed. To reiterate, they do not find the source of the leak, but they do find something else involving water, so whatever. This is all mostly a pretext for Ember and Wade to spend a lot of time together so they fall in love. This will absolutely kill her bigoted father, so she hides this fact from him, especially since she's already killing him with her fumbling inability to run the story. So if you're counting, that's three wholly different plotlines (the love story, the father-daughter relationship, the mystery about the city's water system - which is, I swear to God, the actual A-plot, I'm not just being weird about it), and that's without getting into the conflict between the water/air/earth people (who stand in for American WASPs) and the fire people (who stand in for literally everything other than WASPs, though they mostly feel like a mish-mash of Iranian, Indian, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants), which Elemental doesn't end up having the energy - or the space - to develop up to the status of "plotline".
Basically none of this works: the romantic comedy elements probably come closest, because they're the one where the metaphor is the least disastrously bad and confusing, though the writers ultimately have no way to resolve it other than staring us dead in the eye and saying, "you know that rule we've established and reiterated throughout the movie about water and fire touching, and how that would be bad? Fuck you, that rule doesn't count any more". It suffers pretty badly from the film's highly unusual-for-Pixar flaw of having an almost uniformly bad cast; Lewis is mediocre but not distractedly so, but Athie (a Mauritanian-born actor inexplicably playing a character defined by the script almost in his entirety as "unexceptional white guy") is kind of actively unpleasant, going very nasal and deciding to latch onto "always about to start crying" as the thing he'll do with the character. The result is a pair of characters it's hard to care about individually or as a romantic couple. And this is the subplot that is the best part of the script.
All of which is to say: Elemental is exasperatingly mediocre, a movie that finds Pixar laboring to do an embarrassingly bad job at the things it used to just do. It is perhaps not an accident that it's the second (and, probably, last) feature at the studio directed by Peter Sohn, whose only other work as director was to guide the battle-scarred wreck of The Good Dinosaur to a close in 2015; I like that movie more than a lot of people, but it's still probably the other Pixar film whose world-building is as flagrantly bad as it is in Elemental. Though at least its story is harmlessly generic; the story here is a confusing jungle of dangling causes, unearned leaps, and character motivations clearly driven by what will make the narrative go forward rather than who these characters are, as little as we get to know of them.
There are two things salvaging this. One is that Thomas Newman has provided a magnificent score, maybe his best since WALL·E in 2008: it's drawing on the various musical forms implied by the cultural polyglot of "all the immigrants" to create a beautiful sonic melting pot that does more to carry the film's themes about the challenges facing immigrants in an unwelcoming new home more than anything in the writing. The other is that Elemental is one of the few Pixar films since 2016 that is earnestly trying out new things in its visuals. Having the main characters all be amorphous states of matter means that they're as much effects animation as they are character animation, and the way the filmmakers have handled the fire people, in particular, is really quite lovely: they're not, apparently, actually textured, so much as that they are comprised of several layers of different-colored lighting effects that all work slightly independently of each other. It's very admirable technique, and I wish it had more to do. Meanwhile, the animators are obviously having a good time solving the problems of how to give characters without solid structure consistent visual personalities even when they're not recognisable as figures. And this against the backdrop of a world that has some very neat design choices, even though they're design choices that generally get us to "that's a fun idea!" but do not get us to "...and it makes me understand more about this world and these characters!". Also, it's 2023, and the fact that Pixar has the best computers just isn't enough any more: in the last seven months, we've had both Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse demonstrate that there is so much stylistic range that CG animation is capable of that Pixar seems perversely uninterested in even acknowledging as a possible goal, let alone moving in the direction of that goal. Even so, Elemental is pretty as hell, boldly colored, and imaginative. I appreciate all of that, even if it feels like a ton of effort to prop up a dismal script.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Even by the standards the Walt Disney Corporation began setting themselves with 2016's similarly batshit Zootopia ("there is a particular race that is genetically hard-wired to be murderous, savage beasts, and they might snap back into their horrific carnivorous ways with no warning if even the smallest thing goes slightly wrong. Being biased against these people is unjustifiable"), this is just wrong, presenting the idea that different ethnic groups are basically different species, and it is the inherent nature of each species to destroy at least one of the others, building many gags and narrative conflicts that call direct attention to the incomprehensible dangers that would attain from attempting to combine the needs of these different species, and then acting like only a weirdo would care. It's the most immediately apparent way that the Elemental story and screenplay (which has four different credited authors, let alone the many people in the studio who had to okay this along the way) are just flat-out broken: it is, not only for the incredible weakness of its central metaphor, the most unsound script that Pixar has ever turned into a feature film. This was a studio that once upon a time made one of its fundamental strengths the exploration of complex, fully-realized worlds: bug worlds, monster worlds, fish worlds, car worlds, Scotland. The Pixar golden age is far enough in the past that it's not worth hoping for it to come back any time soon, but even so, Elemental is just horrifically bad at world-building; its concept is pure nonsense right from the world go. So, the four classical elements - air, fire, water, earth - what if those were, like, people, right? People made of fire, people made of water, people made of clouds, people made of... dirt, I think, though their visual representation is all about the plants growing out of them in what is inconsistently represented as hair. At one point, an earth couple is kinkily plucking apples off each other when they think nobody is watching - a horrible gag that the studio is so proud of that it was featured in the trailers - and this would be, I guess, the equivalent of lovers getting each other off by chewing on one another's pubes. But okay, fire people, water people, cloud people (who are, in theory, an ascended version of the water people, but the film doesn't notice this), dirt people. Let us say that a fire person and a water person fell in love. Don't you think things between them would get pretty, heh heh, steamy? That's it, that's the whole of the world-building.
There are a lot of holes there, but let's spot them that. "What if elements had feelings?" had no chance of feeling like anything other than Pixar making a parody of itself, but sometimes that can work out. That is, however, a logline, not a story, and the story to Elemental is just... awful. There's a whole city that is built around the water, cloud, and dirt people, built primarily around water (but, I guess, water with a lowercase-w rather than Water with a capital-W, since it mostly doesn't seem to be sentient: even the public transit is some kind of combination of water-based monorail, sort of like if Walt Disney had decided that it's a small world was the future of transportation technology instead of the PeopleMover. The fire people, meanwhile, have only lived here for apparently two or three generations, and live together on the outskirts of town, where they cannot be drowned by the omnipresent water, nor can they inadvertently murder the dirt people. And we have met no characters and not yet had the inkling of a narrative, and I already have so many questions. What is the backstory of this world? If there are, and have always been, four population who are also the elements, surely they've all known this for many centuries? I will not indulge myself in a rant - if I did that, there'd be no end to it, and I'd ultimately have a 4000-word review that's nothing but nitpicking. Suffice it to say that the world Elemental presents is immediately unpersuasive and feels under-conceived in ways that make it terribly unappealing to want to learn more about it. And to overcome this, the film basically straight-up cheats, by giving us many long, loving tracking shots of the water/air/earth part of town, and building gag after gag after gag around those elements, but leaving the fire people represented basically just by the protagonist, her parents, one room in a a store, and a few signage gags.
The protagonist in question is one Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis) whose parents Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen, a Pixar story artist being given his first meaty voice role) and Cinder (Shila Ommi) emigrated from Fire Land after an unexplained catastrophe, while Cinder was pregnant. As one of the first fire people in Element City, Bernie's business catering to the needs of fire people made him a center of the community, and now, a couple of decades on, he's gearing up to retire and hand his beloved shop to Ember. Only she has a tendency to get very angry at very little provocation - she's hot-tempered, you could say! - and one day she explodes so hard that she knocks the pipes lose in the shop's basement, spraying water all over. Later, an air-person City Works administrator named Gale (Wendi McLendon-Covey) will express shock that this happened, given that the water to the fire neighborhood was shut off to avoid just such a potentially deadly occurrence. Impressively, despite this one specific line of dialogue being what launches the whole story into movement, we never actually get an explanation for what happened. Back in the present, a portion of the water forms itself into the body of Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie), a plumbing inspector who was chasing a leak. Again, this gets basically dropped - the "explanation" involves a flood on surface streets, not anything to do with the city's plumbing infrastructure. To be clear, Elemental absolutely, no two ways about it, thinks that it has satisfyingly explained all of this. The most charitable thing I can come up with is that none of the writers have even the most superficial concept of how civic engineering works.
Long story short: Wade writes Ember up for a whole host of code violations, but then takes pity on her when she appeals to his emotions - he cries easily, because he's water, you see. So he convinces Gale to make a deal that if he and Ember can track down the source of the leak, all those violations will be memory-holed. To reiterate, they do not find the source of the leak, but they do find something else involving water, so whatever. This is all mostly a pretext for Ember and Wade to spend a lot of time together so they fall in love. This will absolutely kill her bigoted father, so she hides this fact from him, especially since she's already killing him with her fumbling inability to run the story. So if you're counting, that's three wholly different plotlines (the love story, the father-daughter relationship, the mystery about the city's water system - which is, I swear to God, the actual A-plot, I'm not just being weird about it), and that's without getting into the conflict between the water/air/earth people (who stand in for American WASPs) and the fire people (who stand in for literally everything other than WASPs, though they mostly feel like a mish-mash of Iranian, Indian, and Eastern European Jewish immigrants), which Elemental doesn't end up having the energy - or the space - to develop up to the status of "plotline".
Basically none of this works: the romantic comedy elements probably come closest, because they're the one where the metaphor is the least disastrously bad and confusing, though the writers ultimately have no way to resolve it other than staring us dead in the eye and saying, "you know that rule we've established and reiterated throughout the movie about water and fire touching, and how that would be bad? Fuck you, that rule doesn't count any more". It suffers pretty badly from the film's highly unusual-for-Pixar flaw of having an almost uniformly bad cast; Lewis is mediocre but not distractedly so, but Athie (a Mauritanian-born actor inexplicably playing a character defined by the script almost in his entirety as "unexceptional white guy") is kind of actively unpleasant, going very nasal and deciding to latch onto "always about to start crying" as the thing he'll do with the character. The result is a pair of characters it's hard to care about individually or as a romantic couple. And this is the subplot that is the best part of the script.
All of which is to say: Elemental is exasperatingly mediocre, a movie that finds Pixar laboring to do an embarrassingly bad job at the things it used to just do. It is perhaps not an accident that it's the second (and, probably, last) feature at the studio directed by Peter Sohn, whose only other work as director was to guide the battle-scarred wreck of The Good Dinosaur to a close in 2015; I like that movie more than a lot of people, but it's still probably the other Pixar film whose world-building is as flagrantly bad as it is in Elemental. Though at least its story is harmlessly generic; the story here is a confusing jungle of dangling causes, unearned leaps, and character motivations clearly driven by what will make the narrative go forward rather than who these characters are, as little as we get to know of them.
There are two things salvaging this. One is that Thomas Newman has provided a magnificent score, maybe his best since WALL·E in 2008: it's drawing on the various musical forms implied by the cultural polyglot of "all the immigrants" to create a beautiful sonic melting pot that does more to carry the film's themes about the challenges facing immigrants in an unwelcoming new home more than anything in the writing. The other is that Elemental is one of the few Pixar films since 2016 that is earnestly trying out new things in its visuals. Having the main characters all be amorphous states of matter means that they're as much effects animation as they are character animation, and the way the filmmakers have handled the fire people, in particular, is really quite lovely: they're not, apparently, actually textured, so much as that they are comprised of several layers of different-colored lighting effects that all work slightly independently of each other. It's very admirable technique, and I wish it had more to do. Meanwhile, the animators are obviously having a good time solving the problems of how to give characters without solid structure consistent visual personalities even when they're not recognisable as figures. And this against the backdrop of a world that has some very neat design choices, even though they're design choices that generally get us to "that's a fun idea!" but do not get us to "...and it makes me understand more about this world and these characters!". Also, it's 2023, and the fact that Pixar has the best computers just isn't enough any more: in the last seven months, we've had both Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse demonstrate that there is so much stylistic range that CG animation is capable of that Pixar seems perversely uninterested in even acknowledging as a possible goal, let alone moving in the direction of that goal. Even so, Elemental is pretty as hell, boldly colored, and imaginative. I appreciate all of that, even if it feels like a ton of effort to prop up a dismal script.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
