Elemental City is the name of the colorful place where fiery Ember meets watery Wade. A burst pipe brings together what should not. But before her love comes into focus, it takes a little while. Because the story of Elemental begins with an immigrant fate: the fire family arrives at the port of the big city to start a new life when Ember is just a baby. Air, water and earth already dwell here, but flame citizens are new at this point and the customs and languages are alien. The (uniquely Asian coded) Firefolk found their own district within the city, the center of which is a small shop selling souvenirs from the old homeland and spicy food. So before the water lover can make it into the film, it’s about the small family business and Ember taking it over one day to make her parents proud.
Once you get used to the beautiful animation, the pacing of the film, and the myriad Elemental quips (admittedly, “Timber and Prejudice” was a big laugh), it’s easy to see that while Elemental has exceptional packaging, there’s a lot behind it well-known is stuck. The busy Elemental City with all their little gags and show values - something similar was offered better in Zootopia and Coco. The love story moves between classic screwball comedy, Romeo & Juliet and guess who’s coming to dinner. Much feels exciting in the world of Elemental, but almost nothing feels personal.
Fortunately, the film finds its few extraordinary moments in the central love story. The dynamic of the short-tempered Fire Woman and the overly sensitive Aquarius can generate some authentically heartwarming moments. When clumsy Wade manages to elicit a tear from cool Ember, it seems sincere and loving. Unfortunately, such moments are rare: As if the complicated love affair in the cultural context of an immigrant family with fear of loss and existential fears weren’t enough, there are several subplots that undermine the main story. A constantly flaring conflict about a defective dam seems particularly out of place. Perhaps they didn’t want to risk losing the younger audience in the romantic moments, because whenever the film quiets down, the damn dam chaotically weaves its way back onto the screen, like a jostling waterslide. This not only gets on your nerves, but also takes away time from the other, much more interesting storylines. So many problems have to be solved before the finale that a veritable barrage of cliché guns is fired out in order not to break the running time.
Elemental has the same problem as the world the film portrays: all the ingredients are there, but they don’t want to mix. For smaller children there is too little laughter, too much romance and sometimes even slightly disturbing scenes. For the adults it is too little substance and too much cliché. The perfect audience would be younger teenagers just starting out, who are already interested in the emotional issues but have had so little film experience that everything still seems new and fresh to them. It’s hard to accuse a film aimed at a younger audience of not being mature enough. But it’s a lot easier to feel a little disappointed because Pixar has proven more than once that it’s possible to create films that appeal to all ages. You can also be annoyed that the love story ends up being very one-sided and only one of the characters has to develop further, change their values, while the other is simply right.
A kind of brother in spirit is Inside Out, who manages to make children laugh and adults cry, and at the end proposes a nuanced solution to his central problem. The finesse of extraordinary Pixar films, which can even be found in Sohn’s first short film Partially Cloudy, lies in not simply taking the first solution that comes along, but in thinking outside the box both in terms of drama and humor. For a film whose message is that in order to achieve extraordinary dreams, you have to take risks, Elemental too often simply reaches for the next best thing and sits surprisingly despondently in the middle ground of the animation world.
#Elementals #Movies #Trailers #Critique
