Elemental (2023 | USA | 103 minutes | Peter Sohn)
As a young immigrant family the Lumens moved to the big city of Elemental. They were awed by this new place where fire, water, land and air all live together harmoniously… or so they thought. They quickly found it less than welcoming for fire elementals with the city seemingly built to accommodate water more than others, so they found a little neighborhood with other fires and settled there to open a local shop. Time flew by as their daughter Ember grew and it was a given, both in their actions and words, that she’d take over the family business when it came time. One day, an unexpected visitor brought along with him a crisis that threatened to shut down their mom and pop store, so Ember was hellbent on fixing it. In the process she found an unexpected friend in Wade, a water elemental, and discovered the big city was much more than it seemed.
I’ll start with the good. Elemental is a sweet story of family and love, and any kid would enjoy watching it just for the basics of animation and fun. It also reiterates that immigrants feel frustrated in a new city where they aren’t welcomed as fellow humans deserving of respect (which, lets be honest, could be anywhere in this country) and so they tend to find folks they feel at home around, i.e. other immigrants. The point is, we need to see beyond our own expectations of how people “should act” as we live and grow in our country and accept them for who they are. Unfortunately, this was not the storyline of the movie, they simply touched on it in the beginning in order to cause conflict as Ember made friends with other elements later. Not a good start.
** Little snippets of spoilers so feel free to skip this section **
Now onto some issues. Elemental is all about expectations laid on the daughter of first generation immigrants to follow in their footsteps. She didn’t question it or even realize it, but they were stifling her ability to find her own path. In the end, they told her whatever she is or does, she’s exactly who they want her to be… but at no point in the film did they embody this, just with words at the end. We shouldn’t be teaching our kids that words are all that’s needed and actions don’t matter. It also felt like a quick way to button up the film after several crises, not directly related to this issue, had finally come to a head and then resolved themselves. They also spent far less time on character building and much more on coming up with several reasons why Ember was “failing as a daughter” and a fire element. The story was all on the surface, a complete 180 from its sister film Inside Out that was all about depth.
** end spoilers **
While we’re on the subject of other Disney films, another aspect of Elemental that disappointed was its incredibly parallel feel to Zootopia. The first has a child losing sight of their own path because of their parents and the other choosing their own path despite their parents, but that’s where the differences ended.
I’m gonna get nit-picky for a second, in several important scenes they didn’t follow the laws of physics. While it may seem like I’m being too harsh in pointing that out (“come on Morgen, it’s a Disney movie!”) if you’re going to make a film specifically about elements, I feel like the science of the storyline needs to hold up a bit more than normal… but again, nit-picky. I could deal with that if it was one of only a few issues. Another larger plot point included blaming regular citizens for infrastructure problems that should have been handled by the city. Perhaps that was the point Director Sohn was trying to make, and too often the city ignores things they should be handling themselves especially when it comes to legal or illegal immigrants. That point was such a throwaway in the storyline and never addressed, so I can’t let him off the hook.
All in all I’m disappointed for the first time in a very long time in a Pixar film. While I realize the director was pulling from his own experiences and thought if it as an homage to his family, there were lots of ways it could have been written and edited to build a solid backbone, include deep and engrossing characters and still worked along the lines of family expectation.
Elemental arrives in theaters today (06/16).