Elemental Review: A Decent Return To Form For Pixar's Originality
Elemental Review: A Decent Return To Form For Pixar's Originality
In some ways, Pixar's biggest enemy is Pixar itself. Over nearly 30 years, Pixar Animation Studios has upended the future of feature animation not only through its cutting-edge computer technology but through its manner of storytelling. When the studio's first feature, "Toy Story," was released in 1995, it felt like a breath of fresh air after years of the standard-bearer, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and its Broadway-influenced style of telling classic fairy tales and fables with a musical twist.
What Pixar offered was a mismatched-buddy comedy that transplanted aspects of the human element and how our world operates into a world of non-human characters. And over time, that formula is one that Pixar not only established but has hewed to over and over, in films featuring bugs, monsters, fish, the emotions existing inside a person's mind, and the souls of those in the afterlife. The latter two examples, "Inside Out" and "Soul", highlight (perhaps unintentionally) how hard it's becoming for Pixar to adopt the same formula over time. The same is true of the largely charming but still somewhat limited "Elemental," in which the mismatched buddies not only fall in love with each other but are also anthropomorphized elements of our living world.
"Elemental" is set in Element City, in which communities of people made of air, water, and earth have thrived for generations. But the film, directed by Peter Sohn, is framed partially as a riff on an immigrant story, as we see the first fire people — named Bernie (voiced by Ronnie del Carmen) and Cinder (Shila Ommi) by a well-meaning but confused customs officer — arrive in Element City to make a life for themselves after leaving their home behind. Over time, other fire people join Bernie and Cinder, whose daughter Ember (Leah Lewis) is eventually expected to take over their shop the Fireplace. But the rest of Element City seems mostly unwelcoming to fire people (the phrase "Go back to Fireland" is uttered at least once here), with the exception of a doofy and emotional water person named Wade (Mamoudou Athie), who connects with the temperamental Ember in spite of them being ... well, you know, fire and water.
Source: /Film
