‘Elemental’: Pixar’s Steamiest Love Story Will Leave You Cold
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Elemental — Pixar’s 27th film, and the first to feature star-crossed lovers that literally become steamy when they kiss — forces you to answer a lot of questions right off the bat. Can a young man made entirely out of liquid ever find true romance with a fiery young woman? Could a metropolis with a population comprised of the four natural elements function as an urban melting pot, with disparate and possibly destructive parties finding a way to live in perfect harmony? Must the children of first-generation immigrants be forever burdened with bridging the old world and the new? Is it even legal to make a movie revolving around earth, wind and fire yet not have a song by Earth, Wind & Fire somewhere on the soundtrack?!
All will eventually be answered throughout this high-concept animated romcom, to one degree or another. But what most viewers will be contemplating nonstop in their own heads is: It’s possible to make a movie in search of a central metaphor, but what happens when you find yourself stuck with a 103-minute metaphor in search of a movie? The good people at Pixar know the message they want to communicate — it’s all about tolerance, tradition, cross-cultural respect, generational expectations, emphasizing similarities over differences. They’ve apparently tried to reverse-engineer a story that would get said morals across instead of the other way around, however, and what they’ve ended up with is neither a hot take nor even a flash flood of virtue-signalling so much as something middlebrow, muddled and terminally lukewarm.
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Ember (Leah Lewis, so great in The Half of It) has grown up behind the counter in the corner store run by her father, Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen). Long ago, he and his wife Cinder (Shila Ommi) fled their home country of Fire Town after a storm ravaged the land. In search of a better life on greener shores, they landed at Element City; the couple found a broken-down building in a bad part of town and fixed it from the ground up. Soon, The Fireplace is both a bustling local business and a hot spot for the growing flame-friendly diaspora who now call the neighborhood home. Except Bernie’s getting older — that smoking cough doesn’t sound good — and it’s up to Ember to keep the shop in shape after Pops retires. She just needs to cool that hair-trigger temper of hers. They don’t call her hot-headed just because her head is, in fact, incredibly hot.
During a tantrum, Ember’s high-temperature rage bursts a pipe. Out pops Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a city inspector prone to crying jags. (What, you thought there wouldn’t be waterworks jokes?) He was investigating a nearby leak and the next you thing you know, he’s in Ember’s flooded basement. Wade also notices that the place isn’t up to code, so he writes up a bunch of citations, which will likely cause her dad’s store to close. Ember chases him back to city hall, and long story short, they have four days to find out what’s causing these mysterious mini-tsunamis in the Fire district. The two discover it’s simply a broken door at a reservoir that no one’s bothered to fix. The culprit is not a vast Chinatown-esque conspiracy around resource-hoarding, or some Trump-like real estate developer who wants to drown out the locals to put up condos. It’s just crappy civic infrastructure.
That whole whodunnit aspect of Elemental is merely a MacGuffin, anyway — it’s just an excuse to get these two characters from either side of the tracks to fall in love. Which they do. There’s no spoiler here, just the inevitable disapproval from Ember’s old-school dad, prejudices from both well-meaning and mean-spirited folks, and a handful of gags about what happens when H20 gets near the right combination of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. As for Earth and Wind, they get a few token nods — a sports-loving, civil-servant cloud voiced by Wendi McLendon-Covey, an underage lump of sod named Clod who has sex-pest-in-training written all over him — but the movie treats them both like dirt. Even the high-conceptual notion of a world filtered through nature’s Fab Four feels like an afterthought at best; the movie doesn’t go full Zootopia on the visual puns and wordplay, nor does it take advantage of its scenario’s comic potential past a few “Kiss Me, I’m Firish!’ throwaways. For an animated feature so obsessed with heat, most of it feels incredibly half-baked.
It’s the peripheral details and more personal aspects, which continually poke out among the candy-colored cityscapes and the manic business, that keep your interest from being snuffed out like a candle in a rainstorm. (That, and the presence of Catherine O’Hara, who voices Wade’s equally sentimental, perpetually glass-half-full Mom.) Director and Pixar veteran Peter Sohn (The Good Dinosaur) has said that Elemental is filled with his own first-hand handwringing over the second-generation blues, and you get the sense that the trio of credited writers — John Hoberg, Kat Likkel, and Brenda Hsueh — have embedded their own experiences into the mix. The occasional non-English exclamation and the faintest tinge of accents never ties Ember’s family to any region, it just gives them a free-form ethnicity that speaks to a more universal immigrant experience. Most everyone comes to this American experiment from somewhere else. Most everyone has likely felt, or been made to feel unwelcome, unwanted, like a stranger in a strange land.
And most everyone has known what it’s like to overcome obstacles in the name of amore, even if there wasn’t something racial, cultural, heteronormative, and/or class-based adding internal or external pressure to the relationship. The enemy here is not parental disappointment, traditionalism butting up against modernism, or even basic Science 101 principles. It’s tribalism, the kind that closes minds and fosters hatred, and far be it from anyone to say that we don’t need to beat that particular drum as loudly as possible right now.
But there’s having your heart in the right place and your message on point, and there’s concocting a conduit for what you’re saying that falls between instantly forgettable and foundationally shaky to a fault. Pixar has raised the standards for making animated movies that stoke imaginations, speak to the human experience, and use characters as more than toy blueprints and toddler distractions. If the company occasionally fails to clear the high bar they’ve set, it isn’t surprising. The fact that Elemental can’t seem to get past its own elevator-pitch premise or avoid tripping over its teachable lessons, much less wring laughs and sobs from an opposites-attract love story, is a bit of a shock. It’s so busy trying to pen an op-ed that it forgets to give it a narrative structure and make it emotionally resonate. That’s just elementary.
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