Elemental: Does It Burn Bright?

Pixar has been going through it lately.  Over the past couple of years, several of their projects went straight to streaming.  Soul I understood, since it was the middle of the pandemic.  However, Luca and Turning Red were both supposed to be in theaters, but the idiot higher-ups at Disney decided to just throw them on streaming.  This was a terrible decision.  Pixar movies are meant to be seen on the big screen and the fact they they were just unceremoniously dumped on Disney+ to get subscribers really bums me out.  Luckily last year, Lightyear went to theaters.  Unfortunately no one went to see it.  The same thing is happening to Elemental.  The previous Disney CEO Bob Chapek has done a lot of damage to the Pixar brand and I'm glad he's gone.  Please go see this in the theater.  Pixar is one of the best studios and it sucks to see them going through this.  With all of that out of the way, let's dive into the review!

Elemental is directed by Peter Sohn and stars Leah Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Ronnie Del Carmen, Shila Ommi, and Catherine O'Hara.  Element City is a place where fire, water, air, and land all live together.  When Ember (Lewis) accidentally puts her father's shop in danger of being shut down, she meets Wade (Athie) and their lives are changed forever.  With all of that out of the way, let's get started!

Elemental is a really cute and fun movie.  More than anything, it's a love story.  The whole time, we're rooting for Ember and Wade to work things out.  Ember is the daughter of Bernie (Del Carmen), who left his homeland to give his family a better life.  She feels this burden of having to repay her father for what he's done and is trying to prove that she can run his shop.  Wade comes from a wealthy family, but he's also trying to figure out his way in the world.  To make matters worse, Ember is fire and Wade is water so they're not supposed to mix, at least in Bernie's eyes.  It's all something that we've seen done before in movies, but the idea here is really cool.  That's something Pixar excels at.  The scenes where Ember and Wade are bonding is where the movie soars.  There's a sequence where Ember goes to meet Wade's family, but the problem is the whole place is covered in water.  It's really funny.  I've read somewhere that Elemental is very much a metaphor of director Peter Sohn's life.  His father emigrated to New York from Korea in 1969.  He also fell in love with someone who wasn't Asian, sort of like how Ember falls in love with Wade.  You could tell it was a very personal movie and it shows through every frame.  I think a lot of people who grew up in similar circumstances are going to be able to connect to this movie.  It's a great metaphor done in a way that everyone can understand.   This film is also gorgeous to look at.  All of the elements have their own look.  Fire looks sort of two-dimensional and water sloshes all over the place.  It looks so different from previous Pixar films, and I mean that in the best way possible.  Visually, this movie has to do a lot of things, the main one making the audience care about these anthropomorphized elements.  They all just look so cool, especially the fire characters.  One of the plot lines is that Ember loses her temper a lot and, when she does so, she kind of gets bigger and turns purple.  It was a great idea.  When Ember and Wade get close to each other, Wade's "skin" bubbles up like boiling water.  I can't give the artists enough credit for how well they pulled this off because everything just looks so pretty.   This movie has a ton of visual gags, too.  There's a scene that takes place at a sporting event and the crowd does the wave, but it's literally like a tidal wave since the people are water.

There's nothing really bad about Elemental.  It's not Pixar's best, but that's not necessarily a negative thing.  Not every movie needs to be a banger.  It has a lot of cliches that we've seen in a bunch of movies before: Characters worrying about living up to their parents, a couple that's not supposed to be together, a daughter who wants to do her own thing, and few others pop up.  Like I said, this isn't really a bad thing, we've just seen it many times.  There are some jokes that don't work really well.  When we first meet Wade, he's crying for some reason.  We later learn that the rest of his family does this as well.  The set up to the relationship developing is a little rocky as well and might leave some people bored.  This movie was marketed sort of like an element version of Zootopia, which it's not.  Like I said before, this is a love story above all else.  That's not really the movie's fault but the marketing's.  At times, it can get pretty predictable and I was able to see some things coming a mile away.  I thought it would've been neat to explore some more of the other elements as well, since most of the focus is on fire and water.  There's one character named named Clod (Mason Wertheimer) who's pretty funny, but doesn't add a lot to the movie.  

Elemental is a very cute movie.  It succeeds mainly because of the two leads and their chemistry, the immigrant metaphor, beautiful animation, and the humor.  It's held back a little bit by the cliches, predictability, the set up, and some extra characters.  This is still a really good movie, that deserves a lot more attention.  If you're going to the movies, please see this instead of The Flash.  Also, be sure to get there a little early because there's a short called Carl's Date that's a continuation of Up.  It follows Carl going on his first date since Ellie passed away and it's just so charming.  Ed Asner was able to do the voice before he passed away too.  If I were to rate it, I'd give Elemental an 8/10.  Please go see it!