Elemental: Pixar's Latest Fails to Ignite

By Jim Slotek

Rating: C-plus

Silly me. When I first heard the single-line pitch that Pixar’s latest film Elemental would take place among the denizens of a place called Element City, I envisioned a plot involving actual anthropomorphised elements.

Characters comprised of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, sulphur, etc. would deal with seemingly insurmountable differences by discovering that they could join together and become stronger by becoming covalent. A noble (gas) metaphor indeed.

Maybe Disney was having enough trouble in Florida lately without possibly having to deal with the governor insisting there’d be no “woke” covalent activity in his state.

Ember and Wade take in a game of Airball

In any case, that’s not what Elemental is about.

Instead, the characters in Element City are representative of the ancient Greek notion of elements – earth, air, fire and water (none of which are actually elements). They are basically blobs, clouds, clumps of dirt held together by burlap or foliage, and ambulatory bonfires.

As an artistic design challenge, Elemental has triumphant moments (which may be good enough eye candy to keep kids occupied). But as a story, it doesn’t appear to aspire to much beyond a standard star-crossed romance.

And when we think of the best of Pixar, we remember movies with higher themes for the adults in the audience. WALL-E was a robot romance that was really about environmental degradation and our mechanical separation from the natural world (first symptom, we get fat). Toy Story carried a melancholy theme of what we lose when we leave childhood behind. And at least two Pixar films – Soul and Coco - have been about death and the afterlife.

There is a stab at the immigrant experience with the story of Bernie and Cinder (voiced by Ronnie Del Carmen and Shila Ommi), and their daughter Ember (Leah Lewis). They are refugees from Fireland who, having arrived full of hopes and dreams in a gleaming New World, are consigned to live and operate a store in a segregated area called Firetown. (Kudos, by the way, to del Carmen, whose thick accent is an amalgam that, at various times, can evoke Middle Eastern and Eastern European, but never exactly enough to offend anybody.)

For some reason, the city’s water supply, which is not exactly welcome in Firetown, keeps being diverted there. Which is how the “smokin’ hot,” quick-to-anger and accident-prone Ember - who hopes to earn the right to inherit her ailing dad’s business - meets an earnest water-person city inspector named Wade (Mamoudou Athie).

(Note the punny names. They keep coming. There are water-children named Marco and Polo and a dirt-boy named Clod.)

Ember and Wade represent a forbidden romance. But to be fair, a couple who could conceivably vaporize each other with an embrace is a little more existential than marrying outside one’s race or religion.

Behind the gleaming glass towers, trains and busy street scenes, very little really happens in Elemental. Wade’s well-to-do parents (mom voiced by Catherine O'Hara) are fairly liberal and don’t object. There’s a race to find the leak that threatens all of Firetown. There’s no actual villain, save bureaucratic incompetency (represented by Wade’s air-person boss Gale, voiced by Wendi McLendon-Covey).

And yes, love finds a way. No spoiler there.

The rest is one-liners and distractions (a lot of effort and resources were put into depicting a stadium championship of “airball” – which is basically Quiddich played by clouds).

It’s as if the artists gave enthusiastic thumbs up to the premise at a meeting the writers forgot to attend.

Elemental. Directed by Peter Sohn. Starring (voices) Leah Lewis, Mamadou Athie and Ronnie del Carmen. In theatres Friday, June 16.