ELEMENTAL (2023) - Mark Reviews Movies

Elemental, Disney/Pixar

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 15, 2023

What Elemental lacks in clever storytelling and considered allegory, it unfortunately doesn't make up for in creating an imaginative world. That's a shock, considering the movie comes from the usually creative team over at Pixar, which has made some lesser movies, to be sure, but very rarely produces something as half-hearted as this effort. Director Peter Sohn's tale of a world populated by anthropomorphic versions of the four elements feels more like an imitation of the studio's formula than the real thing.

There's still plenty of artistry here, although most of it exists in the implementation of animating these four distinct classes, races, or species of characters. The fire people have the sense of hand-drawn things, if only because of the constantly shifting lines and forms of entities made up of flickering flame. Meanwhile, the water people are translucent blobs, shaped broadly in human form but also seeming to subtly morph with every movement, as their bodies adjust to each motion and surface they contact.

The air and earth peoples don't matter as much to the plot, so they appear as clouds with faces and human-shaped lumps of soil with some assorted plants coming out of them respectively. The technique of bringing these beings to life is clearly skillful and considered, but that raises another issue on a more fundamental level.

If the animators are capable of giving such a distinct sense of how these assorted varieties of characters function based on their elemental form, why does the foundational design of them come across as so plain? Most of them just look like strangely shaped humans, which seems like the most obvious way imagining what entities made of these elements would look like.

A similar absence of creativity defines the movie's world, a bustling metropolis called Element City. It looks like, well, a massive city, divided into various neighborhoods—most of which we don't get to explore—and surrounded by the sea (meaning that there's non-sentient water in this world, which is odd but better than the alternative that some water people could be eternally trapped in a decorative fountain somewhere in the city). There are some little touches that seem neat, such as the way the city's public transportation is a series of train-like boats skimming along passages like giant water slides, but otherwise, this place is just like any anonymous city.

Little of this would matter if the story compensated for such shortcomings, but the screenplay by John Hoberg, Kat Likkel, and Brenda Hsueh introduces some intriguing ideas, only to drop them for a simple and straightforward tale. It's a story about star-crossed lovers. She's Ember Lumen (voice of Leah Lewis), a fire person, and he's Wade Ripple (voice of Mamoudou Athie), a water person.

If the names aren't enough indication, a lot of the humor here is based in similar puns, which grow old quickly in the face of such a thin story and just how much potential innovation there could be with these various forms of characters. Some of those visually gags, like a pre-teen earth person developing armpit flowers and the emotional Wade's streams of tears flowing from his eyes, are admittedly amusing—for what that's worth amidst the routine plotting and repetitive wordplay.

After meeting by chance (Wade, a city inspector, is sucked into a water pipe leading to the Ember's basement), their problem, of course, is that fire and water don't mix, and on a broader scale in the movie's world, fire isn't perceived as mixing with anything, apparently. Yes, fire people here are treated as lower-class citizens or threats, essentially segregated to a certain section of the city. The engrained prejudice against fire people here is a notion that certainly adds a hint of depth, but it's only a hint.

The same goes for how Ember and her parents, renamed Bernie (voice of Ronnie Del Carmen) and Cinder (voice of Shila Ommi) upon arriving in Element City from their native Fire Land, are immigrants, as well as how the threat to the shop Bernie built and maintained is one of element people-created flooding. Such ideas put forth a façade of thoughtfulness and real-world significance, but since the screenplay does so little with these notions, they're more a distraction than anything else.

As for the story, it isn't much of one, with Ember trying to save her family's shop with Wade, who puts it in jeopardy in the first place, and the two realizing they have a connection that goes deeper than the obvious differences of their physical forms. It's a tale as old as time, which isn't to say the story is timeless—just that its reliance on such a formula is almost as transparent as the watery half of the couple.

Somewhat saving this increasingly dull material is that, on the technical side, Elemental allows the animators to show why their studio has and continues to set a standard for the possibilities of computer animation. They do a fine job propping up a story and design concept with too many flaws to support itself.

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