Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Leah Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Mason Wertheimer, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Catherine O’Hara, Shila Omni
Intro:
… a simple but earnest romance flick, elevated by some flirting with bigger societal critique, exquisite visuals, and emotional authenticity and catharsis in its immigrant-centred storytelling.
Water. Air. Earth. Fire. Long ago, the four Elements lived together in harmony. Then, everything changed… when Pixar decided to make a rom-com.
While romantic subplots have shown up here and there throughout Pixar’s filmography, Elemental marks the first time that the story is primarily about romance. Specifically, the star-crossed romance between the hot-headed fire element Ember (Leah Lewis) and the sappy water element Wade (Mamoudou Athie).
Coming from a first-generation immigrant family from Fireland and an affluent urban upbringing respectively, their initial meet-cute and eventual courtship is cut from the My Big Fat Greek Wedding culture-clash coupling cloth. It hits quite a few familiar notes, both within this specific subset of the rom-com and just rom-coms in general. However, Lewis and Athie’s chemistry on-screen makes for a sweet and steamy love story.
If you’re already groaning at those puns, bear in mind that this is a Pixar production, so there’s more than enough of them to go round when it comes to the setting of Element City and its citizens. Both the figurative and literal world-building on display – from the socioeconomic status of the city’s boroughs to the drop-dead gorgeous architecture to just the logistics of how each of the four Elements affect their environment – show every bit of the seven years of production that went into this. It takes the visual abstractions that Pixar has been toying with since Inside Out, and marries it with the cultural and racial commentary of Zootopia, to make for the kind of city you wouldn’t mind getting lost in.
Said commentary may not go as hard as that found in Zootopia, but credit to writers John Hoberg, Kat Likkel, and Brenda Hsueh for bringing some palpable reality into Ember’s personal tug-of-war between doing right by her parents and their culture, while fulfilling her own ambitions and desires. Director Peter Sohn (who also worked on the underrated The Good Dinosaur) pulled from his own experiences as a New York native in bringing this story together, and it certainly exudes that emotional truth of trying to be part of the melting pot and achieving The Dream without, well, watering down where you come from.
But again, because the film stacks so many of its chips into the romance (to the point where its strongest visual metaphor for the cultural frictions within the city ends up just being used to represent Ember and Wade’s relationship), whether this will work for a given audience will come down to how willing they are to go along with familiar genre tropes and a decent serving of romantic cheese. The animation is impressive, even by Pixar’s standards, and Thomas Newman’s soundtrack gently pulls at the heartstrings (his collaboration with Lauv on ‘Steal The Show’ especially plays them like a harp), but you’ll still need to accept the weepy love story and to just go with the flow.
Elemental is a simple but earnest romance flick, elevated by some flirting with bigger societal critique, exquisite visuals, and emotional authenticity and catharsis in its immigrant-centred storytelling. After the unfortunate and bewildering misfire of Lightyear, this makes for a thankful step back in the right direction.
