Elemental
It wasn’t until I was 30 when my parents really understood that I wasn’t just in a period of feeling adrift in life, that I was creating one for myself. Generation through generation, parents expect their children to follow a certain pattern that typically involves some form of college, graduation, career, then marriage. The first two were very much achieved by me, but after college, the career I wanted to have never really materialized. Part of that is because, even now, I don’t find myself very assertive to actively pursue something, and make connections to make it happen, but also, comfort was important to me on account of my anxiety. But, I was also growing, not just myself but my circle of friends. They didn’t realize it until I was hospitalized in 2007, and so many people from work and friends came to visit me. I was building my life in a way that was easy for me to process, and they changed their feelings about how my life should have gone after that.
This was the journey between my parents and I that came to my brain during Peter Sohn’s “Elemental,” which also tells a very personal story for him. This is a film about immigrants and cultures and accepting the differences between parents and children and putting old prejudices aside out of a love of something more important than our ego. Bernie (Ronnie Del Carmen) and Cinder (Shila Ommi) are a couple from the Fire Land who go to Element City to build a life for themselves and their daughter, Ember (Leah Lewis). What they find in the city is a land filled with people from different cultures, but also prejudices that make them feel as though they can only stay in their own part of town, Fire Town. Bernie opens a shop, and hopes that- one day- he will be able to pass it on to Ember. She doesn’t seem to be able to connect with customers, though, and when she loses her temper one day, old pipes burst in the basement, flooding it, and bringing an inspector, Wade (Mamoudou Athie), with it. You see, Wade is made of water, and he finds a lot of violations that could mean dreams crushed if he and Ember cannot find the cause of the water.
I’ve seen some people say that the themes are heavy-handed, and that is true, but I think one of the great things in the screenplay by John Hoberg, Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh is that they understand the genre their going for (a screwball romantic comedy) isn’t about subtlety and rewards going a bit over-the-top. Yes, you can do this type of social commentary in an animated fantasy with directness that isn’t heavy-handed (see “Zootopia”) but “Elemental” is more about its opposites attract romance, and how Ember tries to balance her family responsibilities along with creating the building blocks of a mismatched romantic pairing. Because we’re dealing with the elements, there’s nothing subtle about how each one reacts to the other, and I think that’s an important thing for the film to establish if the acceptance (on all fronts) is going to happen by the end.
I don’t know that I’d say this is one of Pixar’s most impressive pieces of animation, but I think the character design is on another level from previous films. With the fire people and water people, in particular, the ways in which their bodies- and especially faces- move with flames and water flowing is important to us buying the world, and there’s a more expressionistic feel to those designs that I love watching come to life. Constantly, we’re aware that Ember and Wade should not connect on any level, especially physically, and while we know they will as they get closer, there’s still suspense when it happens because we’re worried about what might happen. When they do, it’s some of Pixar’s most imaginative character work in ages, and something I truly felt watching it. And it’s all scored with some of Thomas Newman’s most creative music in ages, as the soundtrack utilizes songs and score extremely effectively.
“Elemental” is probably my favorite Pixar movie since “Up.” (And to accentuate that comparison, audiences will get the lovely and funny “Carl’s Date” short at the start of the film.) It isn’t their most adventurous one in terms of animation, or even their strongest written one, but the reason this film grabbed me is because of its heart, and like “Coco,” “Up,” and “Wall-E” before it, this film wears its heart on its sleeve, and because of that, it shines.
