Elemental review: Pixar’s latest is beautiful but quickly fizzles out

Elemental: Pixar’s Latest Tear-Jerker

There have generally been two types of Pixar films over the years. The beloved animation studio has produced movies like Toy Story and Cars, which are children’s movies with some adult themes occasionally woven in, and films like Soul and Up, which are essentially movies for adults with some jokes baked in to keep kids interested. Pixar’s latest, Elemental, is a hybrid of the two, and like two opposing elements, it doesn’t always mix.

At its core, Elemental is a story about immigration, family, and love. Set in a world where various elemental forces (earth, wind, fire, and water) are physical manifestations, the elemental forces have their own neighbourhoods and tribes and tend to stick with each other. Ember (Leah Lewis) is a young fire element who lives with her protective parents Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen) and Cinder (Shila Ommi), who emigrated to Element City to start a new life.

Ember works at her parent’s store, The Fireplace, which caters to fellow fire customers in the community. After her anger boils over at work one day, Ember accidentally overheats and burst a water pipe, unleashing Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie ), a water element city inspector. Noticing the building isn’t up to code, Wade leaves for City Hall in order to report The Fireplace, with Ember in hot pursuit in order to plead her family’s case.

However, once Ember and Wade are able to chat face to face they quickly form a burgeoning romance, even though they can’t ever touch. Fire and water don’t mix, right? Or do they? 

That spark of romance is the beating heart of Elemental, and you can’t fault the film’s message of tolerance and love, which feels especially poignant and relevant these days. However, much of Elemental manages to fall flat despite its well-meaning premise. Large stretches of the plot are nonsensical and feel like video game quests, with the characters always in the midst of a complicated mission that feels shoe-horned in to add some excitement to the proceedings (repair this dam, rescue a blue flame). Much of the humour also falls flat, which is dispiriting for Pixar which usually manages a style of comedy that works as well for children as it does for their parents.

Striking Animation Style

The animation style is certainly unique, and Elemental stands apart from everything else the studio has made. The fire elementals look particularly incredible, with a water-colour like texturing that looks like traditional hand-drawn animation by way of Pixar’s digital animation expertise.

It feels almost cruel to say anything bad about Elemental, a beautiful-looking film with its heart in the right place. That said, Pixar has set an incredibly high bar as a studio that has redefined animation storytelling for generations of children and adults. Elemental never hits the peaks of even recent Pixar films like Soul or Turning Red, but hopefully, its important message of inclusiveness reaches as many kids as need to hear it.