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Elemental may not satisfy as fully as the greatest Pixar pictures, but it remains a solid story told with dazzling visual flair.

With a heartwarming message and stunning animation, Elemental proves Pixar hasn't lost its touch.

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Ember Lumen

Mamoudou Athie

Wade Ripple

Ronnie del Carmen

Bernie Lumen

Cinder Lumen

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At its best, Pixar is unbeatable, making clever, charming, and brightly original films to touch the heart and spark the imagination. And so it’s been dispiriting to see the animation studio behind such emotive triumphs as “ Toy Story ,” “ Ratatouille ,” “ Up ,” and “ Inside Out ”—among the best films of their respective years, bar none—recently fall short of its past standard of excellence. 

It’s not just that modern-day Pixar has focused on reprising its greatest hits with a parade of sequels (“ Toy Story 4 ,” “ Incredibles 2 ,” “ Lightyear ”), or that the studio’s slate of recent originals (“ Soul ,” “ Luca ,” “ Turning Red ”) have all, oddly enough, centered on characters transforming into animals (a revealing trope for its prevalence in films about feeling different, whose initially diverse protagonists invariably spend most of the runtime covered in fur or scales). Also absent lately at Pixar, a subsidiary of Disney since 2006, is the mastery of execution that had distinguished the studio, a brilliance for establishing high-concept premises and effortlessly navigating their particulars. 

“Elemental,” Disney and Pixar’s latest, feels emblematic of the studio’s struggle to recapture its original magic, making a mess of its world-building in service of a conventional story that fails the talent of the animators involved. Set in a world where natural elements—earth, fire, water, air—coexist in a New York-style metropolis, each representing different social classes, the film—directed by Peter Sohn , from a screenplay by John Hoberh, Kat Likkel , and Brenda Hsueh —aims high with that central metaphor but is set immediately off-balance by its unwieldiness as racial allegory, an issue compounded by haphazard pacing and writing so flatly predictable it suggests a Pixar film authored by an AI algorithm. At times bordering on the nonsensical, the film feels under-developed rather than universal, a colorful missed opportunity. 

Presented as the closing-night selection of the 76th Cannes Film Festival, ahead of its stateside release in mid-June, “Elemental” envisions a densely populated urban sprawl similar to that of Disney’s anthrozoomorphic “ Zootopia ,” in which ideas of racial discrimination were uneasily reduced to “predator and prey” dynamics to allow for a story that focused more on dismantling personal prejudices than systemic racism. In Element City, a similarly ill-advised simplification is at work (though Sohn has explained that his Korean heritage and desire to make a film about assimilation fueled some of the creative decisions), and there’s even a similar eyebrow to raise with regard to the legitimate danger that these contrasting elements, like foxes to rabbits, pose to one another. 

In “Elemental,” socially privileged water people flow back and forth through slickly designed high-rises and have no issue splashing down the city’s grand canals and monorails, which were designed for their gelatinous-blob bods, whereas fire folk are sequestered to Firetown, where their tight-knit community reflects East Asian, Middle Eastern, and European traditions—and accents run the gamut from Italian to Jamaican, Iranian, and West Indian, in a way that uncomfortably positions fire as representative as all immigrants and water as representative of the white upper-class. Earth and air, meanwhile, barely register; we see earth people who sprout daisies from their dirt-brown armpits, and cotton candy-esque cloud puffs playing “airball” in Cyclone Stadium, but the film is surprisingly non-committal in imagining the chemistry of inner-city elements interacting. Background sight gags abound, such as the “hot logs” that fire folk chow down on, but the actual ins and outs of Element City are explored only superficially, such as the revelation that all these elements take advantage of the same public transit. Replete with computer-generated inhabitants and generic modernist structures, its milieu feels more like concept art, to be further detailed at some point in the animation process, than a fully thought-through, lived-in environment.

“Elemental” centers on hot-tempered Ember Lumen ( Leah Lewis , of “ The Half of It ”), a second-generation immigrant who works as an assistant in her father’s bodega shop. Fire people who emigrated from Fireland, from whence they brought spicy food and rigid cultural traditions of honor and lineage, Ember and her father Útrí dár ì Bùrdì ( Ronnie del Carmen )—though he and his wife Fâsh ì Síddèr ( Shila Ommi ) had their names Anglicized to Bernie and Cinder at the “Elemental” equivalent of Ellis Island—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, as her beloved “ashfa” says he expects, or whether her gifts—such as the ability to heat a hot-air balloon and mold glass with her hands—might lead her in another direction. 

Unable to control her emotions, which can take her from red-hot into a more ominous purple shade, Ember one day ruptures a pipe in her father’s shop, at which point city inspector Wade ( Mamoudou Athie ) gushes in. Wade’s been investigating the city’s dilapidated canal system, searching for the source of a leak that keeps flooding Ember’s basement but imperils all of Firetown. Determined to keep her father’s business from going under, Ember pursues and then quickly joins forces with Wade. As romance sparks between the two, they make for a particularly odd couple given one of the film’s less-than-convincing rules: that “elements don’t mix,” for reasons both practical and parochial, in Element City. Ember might extinguish Wade, while he could douse her flame, but their inevitably steamy romance is moreso forbidden because her father would never approve, setting up “Elemental” as an interracial love story, the kind Pixar hasn’t yet told with human characters.

From there, the film works like a checklist of Pixar storytelling clichés, its two opposites at first getting on one another’s last nerve but gradually forming a close bond, before separating over what amounts to a basic misunderstanding, which is resolved in climactic fashion as the two rescue one another from a looming threat and rekindle their love. Still, as the plot’s frantically paced chain reaction of events keeps Ember and Wade together, their relationship becomes the film’s slight but endearing center, a welcome respite from the mixed metaphors and misshapen conceptual mechanics that often threaten to break the story’s inner reality. (Why, for example, is what will happen if Ember and Wade touch such a mystery to them both, in a city whose ceramic and terracotta glass structures point to other elements interacting?) 

Lewis voices Ember with a playful warmth that nicely complements the bubbling affability that Athie brings to Wade, while the animation of both their bodies—hers flickering then suddenly ablaze with emotion, heat wafting upward; his fluid and transparent, prone to collapsing into a puddle on the ground—is always exciting to look at, emphasizing malleability and dabbling in abstraction. 

But even the film’s promising use of color, form, and movement feels hemmed in by the unimaginative storytelling. Only a few standout sequences—a visit to an underwater garden of Vivisteria flowers, a detour into hand-drawn animation that tells a love story in minimal, swirling lines—separate “Elemental” from any other Pixar film in which the characters are phosphorescent little blobs traveling through realistically animated cityscapes, and as rapidly as the film progresses it never goes anywhere unexpected. 

There’s similarly nothing in “Elemental” to recall the wondrous aesthetic imagination of modern Pixar classics like “ Finding Nemo ” and “ Wall-E ,” with the exception of a rich score by composer Thomas Newman that takes its cues from a potpourri of global musical traditions and presents a more fully formed vision of cross-cultural exchange than the film’s muddled depiction of immigrant communities. Perhaps fittingly for a film that would have more accurately been titled “When Fire Met Water…,” “Elemental” is combustible enough from minute to minute, but it evaporates from memory the second you leave the theater.

This review was filed from the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. "Elemental" is now playing in theaters.

Isaac Feldberg

Isaac Feldberg is an entertainment journalist currently based in Chicago, who’s been writing professionally for nine years and hopes to stay at it for a few more.

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Elemental (2023)

Rated PG for some peril, thematic elements and brief language.

102 minutes

Leah Lewis as Ember Lumen (voice)

Mamoudou Athie as Wade Ripple (voice)

Ronnie del Carmen as Bernie Lumen (voice)

Shila Ommi as Cinder Lumen (voice)

Wendi McLendon-Covey as Gale (voice)

Catherine O'Hara as Brook Ripple (voice)

Mason Wertheimer as Clod (voice)

Ronobir Lahiri as Harold (voice)

Wilma Bonet as Flarrietta (voice)

Joe Pera as Fern (voice)

Matthew Yang King as Alan / Lutz / Earth Pruner (voice)

Clara Lin Ding as Little Kid Ember (voice)

Reagan To as Big Kid Ember (voice)

Writer (story)

• John Hoberg
• Brenda Hsueh

Cinematographer

• David Juan Bianchi
• Jean-Claude Kalache
• Stephen Schaffer
• Thomas Newman

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‘Elemental’ Review: Sparks Fly

The latest movie from Disney/Pixar tucks a romantic comedy inside a high-concept premise. It’s smoldering and splashy.

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By Amy Nicholson

“Elemental” is the latest Pixar premise to feel like someone laced the cafeteria’s kombucha keg with ayahuasca. Starting eight years ago with “Inside Out,” the animation company has transformed cartoons into a form of group therapy that encourages audiences to ruminate on inner peace, death (“Coco”) and resurrection (“Soul”). This story is simpler (elemental, even). It’s a girl-meets-boy cross-cultural romantic comedy — a good one that woos us to root for the big kiss. But the Pixar-brand psychotropic flourish comes from which cultures. Here, they are water, earth, air and fire — the four classical elements that the ancient philosopher Empedocles used to explain our world — all tenuously coexisting in Element City, a Manhattan analogue founded by the first droplet to ooze out of the primordial sea. The girl, Ember Lumen (voiced by Leah Lewis), is a leggy lick of flame; her crush, Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie), is a drip. When she brushes near him, his body roils. Steamy.

This setup sounds strange and looks stranger. Yet, the four classical elements are one of civilization’s great unifiers, a cosmological theory shared by the Hindu Vedas, the Buddhist Mahabhuta, the Kongo cosmogram, the Indigenous medicine wheel and the zodiac. We’ve long interpreted life through water, earth, air and fire. Now, the trick is to see the life in them, once we squint past the visually overwhelming chaos of Element City, a smelting pot of puns and allusions.

You’d have to freeze-frame each scene to absorb all the sight gags: fire-mommies pushing fire-babies in BBQ grills, tree-couples tenderly harvesting each other’s apples, luxury tower aquariums with sunken swimming pools for a living room, whirlwind basketball games that hawk souvenir cloud-shaped pants. Even then, the yuks spillith over into the closing credits whose margins are cluttered with funny bits of illustrated flotsam like Lighterfinger candy bars and Sizzlemint gum.

The suspension of disbelief is so staggering that one flaw in the execution would cause the whole gimmick to collapse. I decided to trust the director, Peter Sohn, during the opening sequence. As Ember’s future parents, Bernie and Cinder (Ronnie del Carmen and Shila Ommi) disembark upon a bizarro Ellis Island, all-too-aware that they’re two of the earliest fireball émigrés, I clocked her father’s chain mail pants and relaxed. Metal knickers are the kind of minutia that tells you Sohn and the three screenwriters (John Hoberg, Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh) have pored over every corner of their high concept, allowing us to make the mental switch from scanning the landscape suspiciously to marveling in the details.

The staggering design ambition balances out the plot’s affecting, relatable ordinariness, which kicks in a couple of decades after the Lumens settle in and open a store that ignites a thriving fire community. By the time Ember is an adult, the Firish (as in “Kiss Me, I’m…”) have erected blocks of residential kilns that resemble a modernized Cappadocia. Yet, there’s no forgetting that Element City was once a wets-only town. The Wetro light rail zipping overhead creates a splash zone of urban blight in its wake.

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'Elemental' movie review: Fire and water mix but nothing else does in Disney Pixar's first rom-com

“Elemental” attempts to be Pixar ’s first romantic comedy and also the animation powerhouse's first immigrant story. Just pick one next time guys.

Directed by Peter Sohn ( “The Good Dinosaur” ), the new fantasy (★★½ out of four; rated PG; in theaters Friday) combines heady metaphors about racism and prejudice with more lighthearted clichés for a narrative about two very different youngsters who find common ground while getting to know each other. The storytelling suffers from the weight of that ambition, though “Elemental” at least pulls off fun world-building a la “Zootopia” with a city where the residents – of fire, water, earth and air persuasions – reflect four different cultural groups and ethnicities and don’t always get along.

The boroughs of vibrant Elemental City stand in for New York City, and there’s even an Ellis Island-type port welcoming waves of newcomers to the metropolis. The parents of fiery young woman Ember Lumen (voiced by Leah Lewis) were forced from their homeland and landed in Element City before she was born, but quickly found themselves outsiders. They ultimately build a home and business in a neighborhood that becomes Firetown. 

Years later, The Fireplace is a popular mom-and-pop convenience store run by Ember’s father Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen) and matchmaking mother Cinder (Shila Ommi). They’re not fans of other elements, nor is Ember, who’s in line to take over the store from her aging dad if she can just rein in her hot temper. A flare-up one day in the basement results in burst pipes and a “meet cute”: Amid the puddles is water dude Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie), a sensitive and sappy city inspector who got sucked out of another job but now needs to write up (and possibly shut down) the store.

Instead of a feud, the situation sparks an unlikely relationship between Ember and Wade, who bond as they investigate the source of all the water that shouldn’t be coming into Firetown. They grow closer, though Ember’s parents don’t approve of her new water man (Wade’s family is actually pretty cool with the potential coupling), and Ember also begins to question other parts of her life and future.

Pixar's greatest hits: The definitive ranking of the animation giant's movies

“Elemental” weaves themes of inequality, xenophobia and microaggressions into the plot: For example, much of Element City is not “built” with the fire people in mind – their culture seems to be based around Asian and Middle Eastern influences. (While viewers primarily get to know water and fire people, the earth and air folks are mainly ignored, aside from Ember's plant kid pal and Wade’s cloudy boss.)

The points are made but not exactly subtle. And they don't gel particularly well tonally with the familiar rom-com bits, from a hot air balloon ride sequence to a scene where Wade has to eat authentic fire food courtesy of Ember’s annoyed father. But even with the nonstop puns and on-the-nose aspects, there’s a winning sweetness to “Elemental” – Sohn’s underrated “Good Dinosaur” also had some good vibes in that respect. Sure, it’s a little corny when Ember's and Wade’s chemistry changes as they fall for each other, yet it still works.

'You feel it all deeply': Pixar's first rom-com 'Elemental' talks frankly about racism

Getting audiences to fall for recent Pixar movies has been a bigger struggle. Three previous non-sequels – “Soul,” “Luca” and “Turning Red” – hark back to the refreshing fare of yesteryear, though they premiered directly to Disney+. Meanwhile theatrical releases like 2022's "Lightyear" have been lackluster, with Pixar's last real hit being 2019’s “Toy Story 4.” (Old-school fans will adore the “Up” short “Carl’s Date,” which plays in front of “Elemental” and is one of Ed Asner’s final roles.)

Fire and water do mix in “Elemental,” although creating something successful and original isn’t as elementary for Pixar as it used to be.

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. 

A tentative romance

If there's any great sense of how Pixar has become its worst enemy, it's in watching some of the setup scenes of "Elemental," which seem like they want to stand on their own two feet but are unavoidably similar to other Pixar films (or other animated films that are seemingly inspired by Pixar). The early montage making clear how Element City is established, with different communities dedicated to air, water, and earth, recalls a similar sequence in Disney's 2016 film "Zootopia" as its lead character first enters the eponymous city and its various ecosystem-based communities. 

When Ember tries to reverse a safety decision Wade makes (before instantly regretting it) and has to journey to City Hall, it recalls the moment in "Coco" when Miguel explores the bureaucracy of The Land of the Dead and tries to get back home. Some of the similarity does seem to be self-deprecating in "Elemental": Pixar films are also well-known for being tearjerking, so a good number of the gags about Wade, who's prone to crying, and his family, which plays something called The Crying Game at dinner to see who won't cry, feel slyly self-mocking.

"Elemental" is not the first Pixar film to feature mismatched buddies who are male and female, nor is it the first with some level of romance involved. But the film, written by John Hoberg, Kat Likkel, and Brenda Hsueh, does try to foreground what ends up being a very tentative romance. It's not just that Ember and Wade are opposites in terms of how they present their emotional states. (If you use "Inside Out" as the corollary, it's like Anger and Sadness falling in love.) It's that the romance is used to bring in an only sometimes effective commentary on mixed-race relationships — Bernie is portrayed as being very stridently anti-water, and a member of Wade's family compliments Ember on how clearly she speaks the language. Leah Lewis (from the CW version of "Nancy Drew") and Mamoudou Athie (from last year's "Jurassic World: Dominion") do a very good job of bringing their characters to life, even if the dialogue isn't always as crisp as you'd like and even when the social commentary fails to be quite as complex as it should be. (There, too, are shades of "Zootopia".)

Shake things up

"Elemental" excels in the same place where Pixar films often excel (including in Sohn's last effort, "The Good Dinosaur"): with animation. Before he directed features, Sohn also directed the short "Partly Cloudy," so he seems quite comfortable in directing a film full of characters who feel like they belong in the world of that short film. The blend of how the element-based characters are animated — approaching something quirkily hand-drawn — with the depth and textures of Element City itself is often remarkable. One key emotional scene between Wade and Ember, in which he enables her to see a fabled tree she'd tried and failed to view in person as a child, is mostly dialogue-free and works wonders because the character and set animation are immensely satisfying and captivating.

That said, the scene's climax recalls nothing less than one of Pixar's best sequences in one of their best films: the "Define dancing" moment in "WALL-E". And that, in and of itself, highlights the eventual limitations in "Elemental." On one hand, it's a good thing that this movie not only exists but is being released in theaters instead of kicked straight to streaming. (Another notable connection between "Elemental" and "WALL-E" is that each film boasts few recognizable actors in its cast, and the few truly well-known names here, including Catherine O'Hara, have only a handful of lines of dialogue.) Here is an original Pixar film, and one driven in front of and behind the camera by people of color. It's a good thing that "Elemental" is here, and the movie is much better than most of Pixar's late-stage sequels. But there is still a notable formula here. At one time, Pixar shook up the animation world by offering a new creative way forward. But now they're the standard-bearer. They might need to shake things up, and soon.

Note:  "Elemental" is preceded by a new Pixar short, "Carl's Date." And yes, that does refer to Carl Fredrickson of the brilliant "Up," as he has his dog Dug help him prepare for his first date with an unseen woman. It's cute enough (even if you might wonder if Carl ever would want to date someone after the passing of his wife Ellie), though it's primarily fascinating because the late Ed Asner may have more dialogue here than he did in "Up".

/Film Rating: 7 out of 10