Much has been made in the past few years of the decline of Pixar’s golden age – and I’d love to report back after Elemental and say it wasn’t true. But gone are the days, it seems, when one could reliably turn up to a new Pixar animated film, and have an emotive, funny, sweet, poignant viewing experience, with a kind of visual wit and occasional sight gag that made for a vivid aesthetic world, too.
Elemental attempts to do all of the above, but it’s almost as though the contours of what made Pixar great have been copied out here in vague watercolour. The characters are less well-defined; the animation is more childlike; the story’s allegory is both too simple for adults and likely to go over children’s heads.
Peter Sohn’s film is the story of a boy and a girl from opposite ends of the social strata who fall in love: only here, in a world known as Element City, that social strata is divided by which element they belong to. There’s Ember (Leah Lewis), a hot-headed and creative girl who comes from the fire element, seen as lower class. And then there’s Wade (Mamoudou Athie) from water, a more middle-class and evidently more emotionally voluble background.
Element City is a place of class and element-divided neighbourhoods, much like our own urban enclaves, and many of its brightly coloured inhabitants have emigrated from places that only had others of their own element there. Fire and Water don’t mix well, geddit? But the fact that Elemental wants to use this as a metaphor for our own divided world is almost immediately apparent.
Still; there is some sweetness and humour to be found here. While Wade and Ember’s respective families struggle to see eye to eye, the pair’s beleaguered love story takes on cutely tragic dimensions, and their dramas are likely to eke a few stray tears in the soft-hearted among us. It’s a cute film with good intentions, but it falls down in how much it feels like a stale retread.
Rather than try anything particularly fresh, Elemental leans into familiar Pixar tropes — progressive, gentle, melancholic grownup stories told in the guise of colourful and wholesome children’s characters and imaginative worlds connected tangentially to some kind of reality. But it’s so much better done in precious films, like Inside Out and Coco, that Elemental does nothing to justify its existence.
