Review: Elemental

Elemental
Cert: PG / 109 mins / Dir. Peter Sohn / Trailer

I must confess I’ve skipped on several recent animated offerings from Disney/Pixar after my lukewarm response to Inside Out, their psychological-explorational adventure which made several people I know act like a light had been switched on while I thought ‘wait, doesn’t everybody visualise their inner monologue this way?’. Don’t get me wrong, that’s enjoyable enough to watch, but I found it withered under the Battleship Curve™.

It was with some trepidation then, that I was treated to the mega-studio’s latest offering, Elemental, courtesy of my local Cineworld’s Secret Screening programme, whereby the film you’re going to watch is unveiled with the BBFC card after the ads and trailers. So the least I could do was give it a go, what with being already settled in to my favourite seat and half way through a coffee*¹.

SHORT

We open with a separate, five-minute short, Carl’s Date, which sees the elderly protagonist from Disney/Pixar’s Up asked out on a date by Ms Meyers from her nursing home. After initially panicking over the morality of his acceptance while still having his late wife’s picture on the mantlepiece, he’s convinced to follow this up by his dog, Dug.

What follows is an extended farcical montage as Carl realises he’s completely forgotten what he’s supposed to do on a date. This in itself is amusing enough, but the rock-solid heart of the piece comes from seeing the relationship between Carl and Dug (skewed of course by the fact that although Dug has a means of physically speaking to Carl, he still thinks like a dog).

The compacted run-time doesn’t allow for any slack, so writer/director Bob Peterson is incredibly focused on what he has to achieve and pulls the whole thing off masterfully. Carl’s Date also shows way more sincerity and comic inventiveness than the feature which it precedes, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves…

MERRY GO

And so onto Elemental. We open in Element City, a bustling metropolis peopled by anthropomorphised air, fire, earth and water. Each of these features the physical bonuses and drawbacks of their lineage, and we see how the ‘tribes’ come to settle into localised communities while still making up the cohesive city as a whole.

The story follows Ember Lumen (voiced by Leah Lewis), a fire elemental who dreams of taking over her elderly father’s ‘fire goods’ store once he retires. After a meet-cute with a city inspector who’s a water elemental (Wade Ripple, voiced by Mamoudou Athie), their frustrated lives become intertwined. But how can fire and water ever hope to mix?*²

With the setup firmly established, cue lots of scripted and visual puns (seriously, those character names are the tip of an iceberg), interspersed with Thomas Newman’s placeholder score and some of the blandest incidental pop-soundtrack you’ve ever wanted to stab biros into your own ears to stop listening to.

BONASERA

Elemental is, in its first act, a heavy-handed metaphor for the New York immigrant-experience of the Liberty Island-era; a tale about how cultural differences aren’t obstacles to divide us, but opportunities for partnership and collaboration. And admittedly this message is probably more relevant than ever, but for a film which is 80% metaphor, the script is remarkably linear.

It doesn’t help that the story gets bored exploring this idea and turns into a meet-the-parents comedy with added elements of class-divide and self-actualisation. Again, all of this is fine in itself, but Elemental’s screenplay was written by four people and feels like it. This is a diluted Inside Out, Zootropolis, and Onward, and as the film plays on the feeling quickly grows that you’ve seen it before.

FERRERA

Pixar’s visuals are solid of course, with backgrounds looking genuinely photo-realistic in certain lighting-states and physical textures exquisitely realised. The earth elementals (so usually looking like plants) are rendered as one would expect, but the visual over-engineering of air (so, clouds), fire and water elementals often feels more like an animation test-reel than the creation of properly memorable characters.

It’s also worth noting that the vocal performances are all over the shop here, even allowing for the random array of accents which are supposed to help the central premise along. Ember’s family are “Firish”, so half the time her apparently-first-generation father has a faintly Celtic twang, while in the rest he somehow sounds like a cross between Super Mario and Big Chief Sitting Bull. This undoubtedly undoes some of the good work that the movie’s setting out to bring.

Worse still, sadly, are the central turns from Lewis and Athie. Both are expressive enough as voice-performers, they just sound way too old for characters scripted like teenagers (even if they're probably supposed to be early twenties). Leah Lewis is 26, Mamoudou Athie is 34, and those years are written right into their voices. Neither feels cut out for the protagonist in a coming-of-age tale.

DRILLER KILLER

Don’t get me wrong, Elemental is an enjoyable enough hour and a half (note: there are no scenes during or after the credits) and means well to the point where its intention really cannot be faulted. It’s just the Disney-Mouse eating its own tail. It’s Pixar being so Pixar that the movie has next to no personality of its own.

The short film brought tears to my eyes. The long film did not. Elemental is still more technically accomplished and thoughtful than most other animation studios could produce, but when your self-set bar is this high, it’s no excuse for mediocrity…

CARL'S DATE:

ELEMENTAL:

*¹ Seriously, if it had been Gran Turismo I’d have bailed. You won’t be reading a review of that terrible-looking shite round these doors, summer-season or otherwise.
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*² Don’t worry, the film teases and teases and eventually goes on to answer this, and at the same time absolutely doesn’t.
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