Review: Elemental

By John Corrado

★★★ (out of 4)

Elemental is the latest film from Pixar (their 27th feature), and it could also be described as the studio’s first romantic comedy.

Set against the imaginative backdrop of a place called Element City, where air, fire, water and earth residents live, the film works as a charming mix of immigrant tale and forbidden love rom-com between fire girl Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis) and water guy Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie).

But seeing as they are literally fire and water, they are encouraged not to mix, which leads to unique challenges in their relationship. If Elemental tells a mostly familiar story in this regard, it does so in a visually inventive way and with a good amount of heart.

The story is also a deeply personal one for director Pete Sohn (The Good Dinosaur), being based on his own experiences as the son of Korean immigrants who moved to New York City in the 1960s and opened a grocery store. The first shot of Element City mirrors how immigrants coming to New York by boat first saw Ellis Island, promptly followed by Ember’s parents being given their English names Bernie (Ronnie Del Carmen) and Cinder (Shila Ommi) at customs, because their fire ones are too hard to pronounce. It’s details such as these that give Elemental its more engaging, personal edge.

Ember is being primed by her aging father to take over the family’s shop, an expectation that falls on her as an only child. The “meet cute” between her and Wade happens when Ember’s fiery anger accidentally melts open one of the pipes in the basement, and the free-flowing Wade comes rushing in with the flood of water. As it turns out, Wade is a city inspector who feels compelled to write up the shop for multiple infractions, with Ember chasing after him to try and convince him to throw out the citations.

From here, Ember and Wade start to form a tentative bond, with Ember having to hide the relationship from her family (her grandmother’s dying words are literally “marry fire,” something that was actually taken from Sohn’s own life, with his own grandma telling him to “marry Korean”). It is hard to view much of this as particularly groundbreaking from a story perspective, and as such Elemental isn’t quite up there with Pixar’s best efforts (in both the themes and design of this world, there are also elements of Disney’s Zootopia).

But this is an easily enjoyable film overall, and one that has a lot of sweet moments in its central love story. If it follows a lot of the usual rom-com beats, it does so in a satisfying way that recalls the best of what the genre has to offer. Lewis and Athie deliver a pair of lively vocal performances as Ember and Wade, nicely capturing the personalities of their characters, who in addition to being different elements also have opposing temperaments that balance each other out. Catherine O’Hara rounds out the voice cast as Wade’s equally sappy and emotional mother, with their family game involving seeing who can go the longest without crying.

The animation is consistently impressive from a technical standpoint, built around characters who essentially double as visual effects (i.e., fire and water, which have been notoriously hard to get right in the past). It’s accompanied by another very good musical score from Thomas Newman, whose at times minimalistic and more experimental sound provides a fitting backdrop. Elevated by Sohn’s personal influences on the story, Elemental is ultimately a consistently charming and likeable effort from Pixar, and sometimes that’s enough.