There’s something particularly tragic about a boring Pixar movie, especially one that hardly carries any of the tenets that have made the animation company so legendary. It’s unfortunate when any good-willed film is bad, of course, but with all the good graces previously engendered by Pixar, watching the culmination of years of animation hardly add up to a memorable experience is a bummer. So much work has clearly gone the animation of its shiny adventure, “Elemental,” but the story is a big problem. It just isn’t there.
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“Elemental” has Pixar working in a dull, safe mode that may appease shareholders but will not deepen a moviegoer’s love for the company. Even the “Up” epilogue short that plays before it, “Carl’s Date,” has more emotional ambition than this feature’s elementary metaphor about immigration and tolerance, set in a world where there are four Earth element races: fire, water, air, and land. Directed by Peter Sohn, who shares a “Story By” credit with main writers John Hoberg, Kat Likkel, and Brenda Hsueh, it’s something of a romantic comedy between the fiery redhead Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis) and the frequently crying Wade (Mamoudou Athie, though you’d be forgiven for thinking of the voice-cracking of Jack McBrayer). The two physically can’t be together, and they know that, but their relationship is formed through weak circumstances we’ll get to later.
The heavy-handed metaphor doesn’t let the movie takes on its own life; it sucks the air out. Ember’s father (Ronnie del Carmen) and mother (Shila Ommi) want her to take over the family store, which they have built up over many decades, tending to the neighborhood of other fire characters. Ember thinks she wants this dream, or at least tells herself she does, and it starts to make her temper more and more uncontrollable. One day, when running the store by herself, she eventually combusts with rage when stealing away to the basement and bursts the pipes. Water isn’t supposed to be there, but it floods the place. Out pops Wade, a dutiful city inspector who looks like a big teardrop with soft eyes. Wade has to write up the violations in the basement, which will harm Ember’s family business. And though he’s crying about it, as sensitive as he always is, he shuffles to the office to take care of it. Ember chases after him, stepping farther away from her family’s home than she has ever before.
It would be believable if “Elemental” was green-lit as a bunch of animation tests—like how to make Ember’s fire head active and rich and Wade’s shape-shifting body reflect light without losing dimension, both of which Pixar pulls off here with subtle grace—with an adventure to be filled in much later. But there are too many moments in which “Elemental” has a little plot to offer than the next assignment for Ember and Wade regarding her protecting the business and eventually creating their romantic bond. Not long after Ember and Wade meet, there’s a mini mission about finding the leak that put the water into those pipes and plugging it up. If it sounds like a video game mission, the dialogue even delivers it as such. It’s just not very thrilling, and sequences of the two rushing around Element City inspire too little of the wonder it should.
There is incredible value in telling a story like this from an immigrant family’s perspective, with our hero Ember depicting the intense weight of first-generation anxieties. But “Elemental” does so in such an easy and literal manner. It doesn’t challenge its all-age audiences but constantly asks them to remember the context, which is exhausting. And as it makes clear just how unlikely it would be for fire and water to bond, these culture-clash differences are treated with little wit. “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” can get away with this same stuff because the fundamental nature of those movies is charming. But in the creative legacy of Pixar, so many creative tools here go untouched.
Ambling from one mildly amusing scene to the next, “Elemental” can be boosted by the savviness of its voice cast, with Catherine O’Hara adding some bubbly excitement as Wade’s supportive and unflappably supportive mom and Joe Pera appearing all-too-briefly as a glum earth character named Fern. Lewis garners plenty of compassion about this fire character and what she stands for, and Athie can be charmingly sensitive as Wade’s nervous emotions constantly turn to tears. The two leads do have chemistry with their voices. But the tale they are saddled with takes too many expected turns and cannot earn the romantic comedy template it later borrows.
This all takes place in a packed metropolis of stacked round apartments, water-powered monorails, and jungle-like offices packed with leaves and dirt (imagine what happens when Ember walks in). But there’s still the strange feeling that much of this world is in the wrong movie: its design, machinery, and architecture are too human-like or treated as templates. It even looks like our elemental characters could be easily swapped out for some other action figures, adding to a generic nature. Not even all the science-based puns—on signs, in the dialogue, scattered everywhere—can paper over that.
Pixar has become known for the sparking cleverness—both in taking audiences on emotional journeys with surprising destinations like “Up” or in engineering impressive inner-logic action like “Inside Out”—is at least visible in the movie’s many crafty science-based gags. It’s easy to imagine an entire bulletin board of imagined ways Ember, Wade, and others could interact with their world (creating gas bubbles, make-shift hot air balloons, using sand for crystallized glass) or help assist others. Even as the story’s overall creativity evaporates, it’s amusing enough to see how these problem-solving moments are integrated.
But for all of the sincerity that went into this endeavor, this movie could stand to experiment more. Its important message about tolerance notwithstanding, “Elemental” is for Pixar completists only. [C]