Steam Heat

Film: Elemental
Format: Streaming video from Disney Plus on various players.

I usually am pretty good about the animated features from each Oscar year. It’s often the first category I finish. The movies tend to be easy to watch, not terribly long, and easy to access. That hasn’t been the case this year, where two of the films aren’t available to me streaming, at least not yet. For whatever reasons, I haven’t been able to pull the trigger on animated Oscar films this year, so I decided to finally bite the bullet and watch the Pixar entry, Elemental.

The truth is that there’s nothing particularly wrong with Elemental, but that’s not really a lot of praise for something that came out of Pixar. We’ve come to expect great things from that film studio even though they’ve had some clear missteps. As much as I would love to heap praise on Elemental, I can’t. It’s fine, but that’s all it is. It’s just fine, and in a different year, or coming from a different studio, there’s no way this gets a nomination.

One of the reasons for this is that it feels like Elemental is clearly taking inspiration from films like Zootopia. Instead of a rabbit wanting to be a cop, though, we’re going to be presented with a world where everyone is essentially one of the four classical elements. Air people are clouds with faces and who are roughly body shaped. Earth people are basically plants (often, but not exclusively trees). Water people are sort of amoebas. And then there are the fire people, who are human-shaped animated flames.

We’re not going to hold back on the message here. A couple of fire people, who speak their own language, emigrate from their country to Element City, allegedly designed for all of the elements. However, it is soon clear that the fire elements are very much second-class citizens. While it’s probably too much to suggest that they are ghettoized in Element City, they are prevented from going in particular places, and they do appear to have a specific area of the city that they are expected to stay in. Yes, Elemental is going to be tinged with some themes of racism. There’s nothing wrong with that—it’s an important message—but it’s also a message that isn’t hit very hard or very often.

We get a taste of it when our emigrating flame people are simply dubbed Bernie (Ronne del Carmen) and Cinder Lumen (Shila Ommi). They soon give birth to their daughter Ember (Leah Lewis, but Clara Lin Ding and then Reagan To in the early scenes). Bernie runs a sort of flame-based convenience store that he hopes to give to Ember some day. For her part, Ember is happy to help out in the store and is ready to take it over despite her temper, or at least that’s what she tells herself.

Everything changes when Ember loses her temper and causes a water pipe to burst in the basement. As it happens, the sudden jet of water captured a water person named Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie), who is also a city inspector. He’s forced to write up the store for a number of violations; there are enough that they will almost certainly be shut down. Ember tries to stop Wade from filing his reports, the reports get filed anyway, and eventually Wade and Ember are tasked with tracking down the source of the leak that caused the problem in the first place. If they can stop the leak, the violations get ripped up and everyone is happy.

What’s surprising is how little of the film initial is surrounded by the water pipe problems. Oh, it comes back eventually, but what you think is going to be the driving action of the entire film is at least temporarily handled by the middle of the story. This is going to take a hard shift into a romance between Wade and Ember. It’s a star-crossed match to be sure, since fire and water are elements that clearly don’t mix.

And that’s kind of the problem. The racism needs to be brought out more. In fact, most of it comes from Ember’s father. There’s a “No Fire” sign at one venue and that is upsetting, but that feels like the bulk of it. There’s another moment, I suppose, when one of Wade’s uncles praises Ember for being so articulate. It’s a quality dig at racists, but it also feels like too little, too late.

The bigger issue is that I don’t buy the romance. I have no doubt that Wade is smitten with Ember, but Wade is a whiny teenager of a water person. He cries a lot (something we learn is true of all water people), and in a lot of respects, he’s kind of unappealing. For this to work, the love story has to work, and I don’t believe it for a minute. These are not characters who belong together, and no amount of hype or cute gestures between them is going to get me to think that’s the case.

Why to watch Elemental: It’s Pixar.
Why not to watch: It’s clearly lesser Pixar.