People gave “Wish” a lot of guff for feeling like an AI generated movie, but I think when it comes down to it, “Elemental” is so much more guilty of this claim. “Elemental” is one of the laziest and more lethargic Disney films ever produced from Pixar and Disney. It’s such a dull concept that’s overcome by social commentary that literally clubs us over the head every chance it gets. “Elemental” is about immigration and the immigrant experience. Element city is America, or The Land of opportunity. We’re told that a least thirty times over the span of ninety minutes.
Meanwhile the writers drop us in to a world filled with lifeless side characters, and the inability to ever make us care about our two main heroes. At no point did I find myself cheering on or empathizing with Ember and or Wade. They’re not only so insufferable most of the time, but they lack any of the usual dimension that most Disney characters manage to invoke. Ember is the new generation of immigrants that want to do more than care for their parents, you see. Because it’s about immigrants. The elements represent different class and social structures. Get it?
“Elemental” centers on hot-tempered Ember Lumen a second-generation immigrant who works as an assistant in her father’s bodega shop. Ember and her parents Bernie and Cinder have a close relationship as he readies her to take over the family business. Ember, though, is questioning whether or not she truly wants to inherit the store. Unable to control her emotions, Ember one day ruptures a pipe in her father’s shop, enter city inspector Wade. Wade’s been investigating the city’s dilapidated canal system, searching for the source of a leak that keeps flooding Ember’s basement. Determined to keep her father’s business from going under, Ember pursues and then quickly joins forces with Wade. Romance sparks between the two, and they soon must deal with their feelings for one another, as well as Ember’s own feelings for continuing her father’s business.
Meanwhile there’s this whole dynamic that feels like it was made up on the fly one night during a meeting. Ember is fire. Wade is water. Ember has hot temper. Wade is cool and calm. They complete one another. It’s so effortless and by the numbers it almost feels like it was created by an algorithm. The supporting characters, which usually help the narrative in Disney films are also quite unremarkable. There’s Ember’s parents, and the film’s villain Gale Cumulus and they’re all so thin developed and unfunny most of the time that they’re on screen. What emphasized the film’s evident lack of realization was that nothing in the universe presented here makes too much sense in the wider scope.
Even Element City feels like a sterile, boring city analogue without the charm and lived in nature of Monstropolis, or Zootopia. If anything the animation is often beautiful and some shots of moving water, and vapors bursting in to the air are fun to admire. But they’re drops in the bucket for what is probably one of the worst Pixar outings in a very long time.