Pixar’s ‘Elemental’ snags closing night slot at Cannes 2023

Jordan Hoffman
·3 min read
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The 76th Cannes Film Festival announced this morning that its closing night film in, oh, just about five weeks will be Pixar’s latest innovative animated film, “Elemental.” The movie is directed by Peter Sohn, whose only other feature credit as director is 2015’s “The Good Dinosaur.” Sohn has been a part of Pixar, working in some capacity as an animator or story developer on most of their titles, going back to 2003. Job security at that shop!

“Elemental”’s premise is a forbidden love between anthropomorphic representations of Fire and Water in Element City. (Air and Earth are in the mix, too.) How this will make any kind of logical sense is beyond me, but have you seen how much money the “Cars” franchise has earned? I think it’s best not to worry too much about realism and, following water’s lead, go with the flow. 

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The voice cast is led by Leah Lewis of “The Half of It” as the young fireball and Mamoudou Athie of “Jurassic World: Dominion” as the drip she falls for. (See what I did there?) Catherine O’Hara, Wendy McLendon-Covey, and Joe Pera round out the cast.

“Elemental” will not be part of the official competition, as is typical for most major Hollywood blockbusters that debut at the festival. (In that regard, it joins “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” this year. ) Previous Pixar movies that have debuted at the annual French Riviera event include “Soul,” “Inside Out,” and “Up,” which opened the festival in 2009—the first animated film to do so.

But here is a bit of trivia: there have been two enormous cartoon movies from this century that have competed for the Palme D’Or. Those films were (and this is true) “Shrek” and “Shrek 2.” France, baby.

In 2001, the jury led by Liv Ullman saw fit to award the top prize to Nanni Moretti’s “The Son’s Room,” with second place to Michael Haneke’s “The Piano Teacher,” and a shared Best Director award to David Lynch for “Mulholland Drive” and The Coen Brothers for “The Man Who Wasn’t There” over the Mike Meyers and Eddie Murphy-voiced flatulent take on fairy tales. In 2004, the jury led by Quentin Tarantino gave the Palme to Michael Moore for “Fahrenheit 9/11” (the only time a documentary won the top prize) with second place to Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy” over “Shrek 2.” I have no possible way of proving this, but I think if QT had a chance to do it all over again, the green ogre would have a statue on his shelf. 

Before “Shrek,” the most recent animated picture to compete at Cannes was “Peter Pan” in 1953. Jean Cocteau and his jury saw fit to award Henri-Georges Clouzot’s “The Wages of Fear” that year, but Walt Disney did get a special jury prize “for his contribution to the prestige of the festival.”

Here is the trailer for “Elemental.” Looks cute.

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