Pixar’s Elemental is a sweet, transfixing tale of an immigrant family of fire elementals making their way through their new life in Element City and the unlikely love story that unfolds. The film follows two generations of a family who are new in a city full of anthropomorphic water, land, earth, and air residents. A city that its very infrastructure is not made to accommodate fire elementals. When the young, temperamental, Ember, meets an easy-going water elemental called Wade, sparks fly, and they go on a quest together to save her families’ livelihood.
Directed and co-written by Korean immigrant, Peter Sohn, the film starts with a fire element, Útrí dár ì Bùrdi, and his heavily pregnant wife, Fâsh ì Síddèr, reluctantly leaving their home in Fire Land with their suitcases and making the treacherous journey by boat to Element City. When they arrive, they find a different kind of place where even their names are changed to make them fit in more with the Element City standards. The newly named Bernie and Cinder Lumen struggle to find accommodations with the locals being unwilling to rent to them because of their fire abilities. Eventually, they find a place that needs a little work and make it their home. They open a shop specializing in fire elemental goods and a fire elemental community grows around them. They proudly protect the blue flame that they brought from their homeland, because as Bernie says, “The blue flame holds all our traditions and gives us the strength to burn bright.” Ember is born and they train her in the ways of delivering goods and customer service, grooming her to run their shop one day.
As she grows, Ember struggles with her temper, often blowing up at customers in the shop—literally. This leads to her father saying, “Please forgive my daughter, she burns bright, but sometimes too bright.” Her mother laments at her daughter’s potentially lonely future if she can’t change, comically declaring “she has just a loveless, sad, future of sadness.” It’s exciting when she meets Wade, a city inspector, and they slowly start to build a relationship. The humorous love story in this film is top notch. At one point Ember and Wade see a film together called Tide & Prejudice, the pun comes into play later when they share the most electric hand-touching moment since 2005’s film version of Pride & Prejudice. It’s a delight to watch Ember go from declaring “elements don’t mix” to a water teen with a crush on her, to considering what could happen if they did mix. Ember begins to learn to be happier and goes on a simultaneous journey of self-discovery, expanding her world, and learning what she truly desires out of life.
Pixar does not disappoint with the animation. They always innovate and introduce audiences to new experiences with their immersive world-building and Elemental was no exception. There was one underwater scene with Ember inside an air bubble, surrounded by flower blossoms, with light refracting in all sorts of interesting ways that was just stunningly beautiful. The Pixar animators put so much effort into capturing light and shadows, and perfecting the mechanics of water, that it overwhelms the audience’s eyes and nearly goes unnoticed on a first viewing. There was a scene where Ember ran across crystals changing her flame’s colors to match each one that was simply gorgeous. The film has a great soundtrack with one love song, Steal the Show, performed by Lauv, which is bound to be a hit.
The voice actors did great work in Elemental, especially the actress who voiced Ember, Leah Lewis. She carries the film admirably with her wide-ranging emotions. The actor who voiced her father, Ronnie Del Carmen, also did a great job as the lovable Bernie. Catherine O’ Hara made an appearance as the hilarious Brook, a water elemental with a knack for crying. Pixar introduced their first canonically nonbinary character with Kai Ava Hauser’s, Lake, in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance. However, the lack of big-name talent for the voice actors might be contributing to the low box office performance.
There were some problems with the movie. Critics have compared the plot of Elemental and declared it too similar to Pixar’s 2016 hit Zootopia. I can confidently say this film is not the same premise as Zootopia, or even very similar, except they both involve a character thrust into a new situation which happens to take place in a city. The extended metaphor about xenophobia and interracial dating only goes so far with this movie before it begins to break down a bit at the edges. The way her father spoke in broken English sometimes felt too much like a caricature. He repeatedly refers to Wade as “a water” instead of a water person as politely instructed. Some of the characters would use what was meant to be a slur such as “watch it, Sparky,” or what seemed like a microaggression toward the fire elementals, but it wasn’t exactly clear if any offense was intended or taken by the way the characters reacted, leaving the audience to guess at what had just happened.
Pixar filmgoers expect a certain degree of originality and innovation when they see a new film and Elemental delivers. Pixar delivered a beautiful love story wrapped up in an immigrant story while creating a whole new world through which to tell the tale. With compelling music, stunning animation, and superb acting this is a movie that families will want to watch repeatedly with each other.
