I found myself unable to suspend disbelief for a single moment during the entirety of watching this overlong movie, and of the thousands of movies I've seen in my life, I can't recall ever having such similar discomfort. This movie made my brain hurt, and there wasn't a single positive attribute (except maybe the soundtrack) to alleviate that pain. Since its inception, Pixar has been committed to building worlds out of fantastical premises: what if toys were sentient, what if cars were people, what if our emotions were personalities who inhabited a surreal geography within our minds. They've made movies that weren't very great, but never, in my opinion, was that due to a failure at worldbuilding. For instance, I wasn't the biggest fan of INSIDE OUT, but it wasn't because I couldn't get on board with its depiction of our brains' interiors; rather, it was because I thought the real-world plot was too simplistic, melodramatic, and unbelievable, unable to properly sustain the fantasy world within. For ELEMENTAL, I can't help but imagine its origins in some burnt out writer sitting in a stifling office, in need of sleep, perhaps intoxicated, thinking, "Well, what if a fire woman and a water man, like, had sex? I don't think that's been done before." And then that premise, which could have only been sustained in a two-minute, extremely experimental and surreal short film, was workshopped in a series of uninspired Zoom brainstorming meetings where instead of trying to figure out how this bizarre idea could be developed into a character-based plot, the other writers only felt safe pitching the most obvious jokes: what if the water man, like, cries all the time? And if she's made of fire, then, like, maybe she eats really hot food! And that, moreover, instead of then trying to develop these obvious jokes into actual silliness that could be the main (and only) attraction of the film, they instead put extremely little effort into the humor and instead somehow got the idea that they were making a serious film about failing infrastructure and the emotional obligations of second-generation immigrants. The end result is an uncomfortable and lifeless mess.
I could not for the life of me wrap my mind around this universe. There are "earth" people who look like trees and dirt and flowers, but the buildings also have hardwood floors and the fire people eat "coal nuts" made by compressing pieces of firewood in their own piping hot hands. They explain at one point that a "water person" is "not just water," so clearly there's a distinction between "elemental people" and inanimate objects that are made of those elements, but I still couldn't get over the fact that if I were a tree person, I would probably be horrified by the fact that fire people eat things that look like my babies. This kind of confusion inevitably haunts every frame of the film. I could not wrap my mind around the characters' basic stupidity surrounding things such as evaporation and condensation, and I was deeply unsettled by the abject boundarylessness of their bodily forms--that in "Elemental City," air people are constantly being walked through, earth people are constantly having their leaves burned off, and water people are frequently being sucked into puddles and floods but still manage to hold onto their clothing... which, why and how are they wearing clothing and what is it made of? The people are chaotic and boundaryless, yet they live in a city that has building inspectors and bureaucracy. The population should all be used to certain facts about their coexistence, yet every character seems constantly surprised by the strange sights happening all around them. The whole plot is built on a modern conception of ethnic segregation, yet the premise segments the population groups based on premodern taxonomies that couldn't possibly be segregated. Isn't a cloud just the gaseous state of liquid water? If fire and water have a baby, then will it be a cloud? If the cloud baby gains too much weight, then does she look more like her water mother? The movie constantly asks you to consider these things while also forcing you to not think too hard about these things because of how obvious it is that the filmmakers haven't thought very hard about these things because if they had thought about these things then they would realize that the film could not exist. It's dizzying and unlike any movie experience I've had before.
All that aside, the romantic plot is entirely devoid of chemistry and heart. The acting is abysmal, and the two leads, who are supposedly young adults, speak and behave like eight-year-olds. The film very obviously wants to be an allegory for realistic American people, yet there's no humanity whatsoever in how these characters are written. If you strip away the disorienting fantastical premise, which is pretty easy to do, then you have a very poorly written and acted Hallmark romcom. If the animation were at least appealing, then there would at least be that, but instead this is probably the least visually pleasing movie Pixar has ever made. I watched the movie two days ago yet cannot recall a single image that I was impressed by. Only the score and soundtrack are halfway inspired.
Writing this, I feel like I might be coming across as a jerk who just doesn't like animated fantasy family films. So in contrast, I point you to ROBOT DREAMS, a movie that is up against ELEMENTAL at the Oscars this year and is not altogether different. It's a feature length film without dialogue about a New York City inhabited by humanoid animals of all species as well as their sentient robot friends. There are ducks who are people wearing hot pants and driving motorcycles and there are pigeons who are just pigeons, and this does not feel weird. There are robots who have minds despite being made of inanimate machine parts and there are also inanimate machines, and this does not feel weird. There's even a snowman that comes to life and somehow has a robust preexisting social life despite having just been born, yet none of this is weird or unbelievable or unsettling to me; the movie is so exquisitely and convincingly made, that it's easy to buy into every mesmerizing frame. The movie is sexless and (largely) genderless and very much kid friendly, yet the love felt between the two main characters is one of the most heartfelt and human portrayals of a romantic friendship that I've ever seen depicted on film. ELEMENTAL is a colossal failure, and that has nothing to do with my inability to enjoy the genre.
I could not for the life of me wrap my mind around this universe. There are "earth" people who look like trees and dirt and flowers, but the buildings also have hardwood floors and the fire people eat "coal nuts" made by compressing pieces of firewood in their own piping hot hands. They explain at one point that a "water person" is "not just water," so clearly there's a distinction between "elemental people" and inanimate objects that are made of those elements, but I still couldn't get over the fact that if I were a tree person, I would probably be horrified by the fact that fire people eat things that look like my babies. This kind of confusion inevitably haunts every frame of the film. I could not wrap my mind around the characters' basic stupidity surrounding things such as evaporation and condensation, and I was deeply unsettled by the abject boundarylessness of their bodily forms--that in "Elemental City," air people are constantly being walked through, earth people are constantly having their leaves burned off, and water people are frequently being sucked into puddles and floods but still manage to hold onto their clothing... which, why and how are they wearing clothing and what is it made of? The people are chaotic and boundaryless, yet they live in a city that has building inspectors and bureaucracy. The population should all be used to certain facts about their coexistence, yet every character seems constantly surprised by the strange sights happening all around them. The whole plot is built on a modern conception of ethnic segregation, yet the premise segments the population groups based on premodern taxonomies that couldn't possibly be segregated. Isn't a cloud just the gaseous state of liquid water? If fire and water have a baby, then will it be a cloud? If the cloud baby gains too much weight, then does she look more like her water mother? The movie constantly asks you to consider these things while also forcing you to not think too hard about these things because of how obvious it is that the filmmakers haven't thought very hard about these things because if they had thought about these things then they would realize that the film could not exist. It's dizzying and unlike any movie experience I've had before.
All that aside, the romantic plot is entirely devoid of chemistry and heart. The acting is abysmal, and the two leads, who are supposedly young adults, speak and behave like eight-year-olds. The film very obviously wants to be an allegory for realistic American people, yet there's no humanity whatsoever in how these characters are written. If you strip away the disorienting fantastical premise, which is pretty easy to do, then you have a very poorly written and acted Hallmark romcom. If the animation were at least appealing, then there would at least be that, but instead this is probably the least visually pleasing movie Pixar has ever made. I watched the movie two days ago yet cannot recall a single image that I was impressed by. Only the score and soundtrack are halfway inspired.
Writing this, I feel like I might be coming across as a jerk who just doesn't like animated fantasy family films. So in contrast, I point you to ROBOT DREAMS, a movie that is up against ELEMENTAL at the Oscars this year and is not altogether different. It's a feature length film without dialogue about a New York City inhabited by humanoid animals of all species as well as their sentient robot friends. There are ducks who are people wearing hot pants and driving motorcycles and there are pigeons who are just pigeons, and this does not feel weird. There are robots who have minds despite being made of inanimate machine parts and there are also inanimate machines, and this does not feel weird. There's even a snowman that comes to life and somehow has a robust preexisting social life despite having just been born, yet none of this is weird or unbelievable or unsettling to me; the movie is so exquisitely and convincingly made, that it's easy to buy into every mesmerizing frame. The movie is sexless and (largely) genderless and very much kid friendly, yet the love felt between the two main characters is one of the most heartfelt and human portrayals of a romantic friendship that I've ever seen depicted on film. ELEMENTAL is a colossal failure, and that has nothing to do with my inability to enjoy the genre.