Film Review: "Elemental" (2023).

"Opposites react" in Elemental. This computer-animated romantic comedy-drama film directed by Peter Sohn, written by John Hoberg, Kat Likkel, and Brenda Hsueh, and produced by Pixar Animation Studios. Set in Element City, where fire-, water-, land- and air-residents live together, Elemental introduces Ember, a tough, quick-witted and fiery young woman, whose friendship with a fun, sappy, go-with-the-flow guy named Wade challenges her beliefs about the world they live in.

Following the release of The Good Dinosaur (2015), Sohn began working on the project when the idea first started. He pitched the concept to Pixar to develop Elemental based on the idea of whether fire and water could ever connect or not. Elemental draws inspiration from Sohn's youth, growing up as the son of immigrants in New York City during the 1970s, highlighting the city's distinct cultural and ethnic diversity, while the story is inspired by romantic films, like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), Moonstruck (1987), Amélie (2001), My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002), and The Big Sick (2017). Rather than visit countries for research, the team spent many hours watching POV city tours on YouTube like Venice and Amsterdam for inspiration. The animation tools were utilized to design the visual effects and appearance of each character, particularly Ember and Wade. Production on Elemental lasted for seven years, both in the studio and at the filmmakers' homes, with the story being finished remotely. Pixar had to upgrade and buy more computers for Elemental. There is over one-hundred and fifty-one thousand cores in use for this film in three large rooms on the Pixar campus. For perspective Toy Story (1995) had two-hundred and ninety-four cores, Monsters, Inc. (2001) had six-hundred and seventy-two cores, and Finding Nemo (2003) had nine-hundred and twenty-three cores. This is a massive amount of computing power.

The film stars the voice talents of Leah Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Ronnie del Carmen, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Catherine O'Hara, and Joe Pera. There are some sweet early scenes establishing the characters' rapport, but Lewis and Athie are so enamored of the standup-comedy world that it takes nearly forty minutes for an actual conflict to be brought up.

The film suffers from an excess of pleasantness, and this very pleasantness thins out its substance, blands out its tone, weakens its comedy. Lewis and Athie having difficulty managing the nuance of their story and the needs of mainstream cinema. They come up with a picture that has a defined cultural perspective, but remains bland overall. The world-building is spare to the point of obtuseness, which is saying something considering this is the same studio that gave us a believable world inhabited only by cars. For better or worse, Disney and Pixar have redefined the genre of cinematic animation, but as their outsized influence has faded, their grip on the title of most inventive seems to be slipping from their grip. This isn't a bad movie per se, but it is an extremely frustrating one that left me longing for the days when rom-coms weren't structured like The Return Of The King.

Simon says Elemental receives:

Also, see my reviews for The Good Dinosaur and Lightyear.