Courtesy Disney/Pixar
Pixar’s newest movie Elemental isn’t doing too hot at the box office. It had, in fact, the animation studio’s worst-ever opening weekend with a measly $25.9 million against a $200 million budget (that’s not even mentioning the $100 million in promotional costs). ‘Twas not much better for 2022′s Strange World, either. How, though, has this once-proud outfit fallen so far? It might have something to do with the city thing.
See, most of Disney and/or Pixar’s releases over the last couple decades—and really, most folks assume all of those company’s fully-CGI films are made by the same people even if they aren’t—a pattern emerges: It’s a city, but for cars; a city, but for animals; a city, but for dead folks; a city, but for element people. That last one’s the basis of Elemental, a star-crossed lovers thing mixed with the vaguest statement on immigration. Let’s face it, the different-kind-of-city thing has become tedious, and there are only so many times we can get a joke about how things would just plum work differently for a dude made out of water than they would for a human person.
Elemental follows Ember (Leah Lewis), a young fire woman who falls for a water guy named Wade (Mamoudou Athie), in a metropolis called Element City also populated by earth and air people. Ember is second generation, with her father Bernie (Ronnie Del Carmen) and mother Cinder (Shila Ommi) having relocated before her birth from a place called Fireland. Nobody pulled any brain muscles dreaming up the names of places or characters there, jeeze. Anyway, Ember’s family owns a shop that sells fire products for fire folks (they eat wood and drink lava, etc.), and it’s located smack-dab in a vaguely ethnic part of town where all the fire folks live. Is the fauxlture (a term I just invented for fictional cultures) Middle Eastern? Greek? Indian? Kind of all of the above, though not really any; and mostly the particulars are conveyed peripherally, through environmental storytelling. We know the dad worships a blue flame and the mom can literally smell love, we know they’ve had a hard road in building their lives and shop.
That’s why it stings so bad when Wade shows up in his role as city inspector. He might shut down the shop, but he agrees to help Ember deal with the red tape because he’s nice. What follows is a grab bag of tropes about believing in oneself, being open with your parents, taking a chance on love and...doing art, maybe? There’s also a water guy character that seems to be a nod to Rip Taylor, so it’s hard to keep track, really. Of course, there’s no real peril because these movies are so formulaic that even kids feel underestimated. In a world with those Spider-Verse movies—which seem borderline experimental compared to this—it might be time for Pixar to dig a little deeper and trust kids to grasp more complex themes than water+fire = probably not gonna work. For now, though, it seems like another tough blow for Good Dinosaur director Peter Sohn (that movie didn’t do so well, either), both economically and artistically. The idea, sadly, just isn’t very good.
5
+Gorgeous animation; cool character design
-Same old Pixar; immigration element feels too vague
Elemental
Directed by Sohn
With Lewis, Athie, Del Carmen and Ommi
Violet Crown, Regal, PG, 109 min.
