To say the world of Elemental is a not-so-subtle allegory of real life wouldn't be an overstatement. To say the themes and plot points explored in this movie diverted a bit of the typical rom-com and immigrant family struggles wouldn't be an oversimplification. I liked this movie, and I think everyone will too. What's not to like?
The animation style is unique and virbrant, mixing 3D and 2D fitting the trend Spiderverse began; the characters are charming, the story endearing and the world stunning and.. a tad underdeveloped. I know what this movie is trying to do, it is attempting this mix between real-life allegory prejudices from Zootopia and metaphysical introspective foud in Inside Out. However, it fails at nailing what these two succeeded at doing:
Zootopia made the effort to establish the pillars of how society worked. Surely the nature of the members of its society (animals) themselves explained most of the prejudices and "class distinction", but the environments and cities were explored in a montage to a certain extent to explore a bit how these different creatures lived together. Here, there are so many obvious questions unanswered that it becomes distracting. You don't need to explain every single rule of how the world works but you still have to establish the grounds for an understandable story. I know the director drew inspiration from his childhood and his parents childhood into the story, and that's why I like it, it feels personal, it feels like I'm being let into the past and the heart of someone who cares. That's why it's more frustrating when some elements presented weren't explored or developed enough to make sense out of everything. So many questions needed to establish the backstory of this world and family: what was this other place the father had to leave from? How is it connected to the Elemental City? Are they the first immigrant family in the Elemental city? Are each element a different race? Why did they move to an abandoned neighborhood, and why was it abandoned? If the world was an allegory of New York or America, why is there only one-sided racism towards fire? I know it makes sense when talking about elements but do other couples combine too? Can they? Will they? The story seems to have a lot of firsts that the setting (inspired by the modern day) doesn't correlate to, if this allegory of the world we live in was as 1 to 1 as the movie presents it to be; this idea becomes a bit anachronistic.
If the fire people are seemingly the immigrants who are not given any help to settle in the Elemental society, are other elements being prejudiced against? And it is just unfortunate because I really believe there are some nuggets of good ideas but the script never takes any chances with it. In turn, every element becomes the most average version of itself: the rom com tropes feel retraced, the relationships father-daughter familiar and stereotyped, the family of the boyfriend somehow white-guilt-tripped.
Not to mention the character arcs. Amber has so much potential in the first half of the movie, boyfriend is a bit annoying but his heart is in the right place. But this is Amber's story, mostly because the boyfriend never had any motivation outside his job and her, he is a blank slate, and that's okay because Amber is the main protagonist. And what a waste. And mostly, her emotional moments were robbed from her: We never saw that Amber wanted to do something other than owning her father's shop, we never knew she wanted to do glass sculpting until bf's mom told her she should do it, and even then she thought no other alternative is to be thought off, only choice is the store; we never saw a inner conflict of her finding her true calling, she just "stumbled upon it", and when it was time for her to be honest with her dad, it was her bf who robbed her of that confession, he forced her to tell him in the worst possible time (in a bad way); she should have confessed that herself, out of courage and with the hope that her dad would understand and respect her choice; not to mention her dad never really lears to accept water people, we only learn he accepts her choice of not taking care of the shop. He never has a heart to heart with the one member of the society who has proven him the water people may not be that bad.
No only that, but during her entire upbringing, Amber was always shown excited to take care of the shop, we never thought she'd be intrigued in pursuing another career path, she went straight to what her father taught her. And then when we see she may not have the patience to deal with bad customers, this could have been a great opportunity to challenge her to be better. Or what I thought would actually happen, that her bf, who was shown to be good at expressing his feelings and hyping up people, would be the one with whom she would learn to cool down and not stress. The element's natural essence work wonders for this concept, she is fire so she can get irritated and blow up, but water is calming and soothing, he could have been the perfect element to combine with.
Unfortunately, the story was too focused on the particular themes it wanted to explore, too personal to the artist to let us into the world they created. The world-building was lacking because the story and characters were more important, and that's fine, but then the world of the elements is wasted in its conceptual potential. This story would have been completely fine as a live action or in a world with people. Zootopia had an overarching plot, a detective case used as a backdrop of their story, a way for the main characters to explore every aspect of the society they had presented. And applying prejudices and commentary on our current society.
The few emotional payoffs do not hit as hard because the story never delves into the intricaccies of any of the themes it presents. It tackles all of them well enough, but it feels shallow as we never get to see how certain prejudices or preconceptions affects the world around them. We learn the water people are actually the "high class" but we never see what the other elements are, and it's not like you can tell right away based on elemental hierarchy because there is no preestablished hierarchy like we can find in the Animal kingdom. The movie rushes through everything and never takes a moment to breath, to settle in the notions it establishes. If anything, the biggest emotional payoff was the salute betwen daughter and father at the end, harkening back to the flashback scene with the dad. It's just that movies like Turning Red have represented this aspect of mix-cultures better than in this movie,
The movie doesn't know what it wants to be, it starts being a "passing the baton" from father to daughter where she must prove she is up to the task, then finds a conflict in that she must calm down in order to do a good job and then she worries about fixing the water fissure so that her dad doesn't learn that the pipes bursting was her fault even though it wasn't her fault because it was the water dam who was at fault so it wasn't really her fault; and yet later suddenly is told she is good at doing glassware and she suddenly decides to leave and.... I just, don't understand the correlation between any of the resolutions of this story. I know on paper they make sense how things "could" be connected, but we never see them connect.
Again, my conclusion to this movie is, I applaud PIXAR for not doing a sequel and creating a new style and world; it says a lot about their capacity to create new worlds and the animation is amazing; it's just that the story retreaded a lot of familiar beats, never trying to tell something new or use its unique world to flesh out new ideas and concepts. I can see the story had personal significance to the director and I'd love to see more of these sort of personal stories and unique perspectives about society; just make sure you also deliver an impactful climax and emotionally resonating but also well-fleshed out pay-offs. But definitely this is the better path for a better PIXAR.
The animation style is unique and virbrant, mixing 3D and 2D fitting the trend Spiderverse began; the characters are charming, the story endearing and the world stunning and.. a tad underdeveloped. I know what this movie is trying to do, it is attempting this mix between real-life allegory prejudices from Zootopia and metaphysical introspective foud in Inside Out. However, it fails at nailing what these two succeeded at doing:
Zootopia made the effort to establish the pillars of how society worked. Surely the nature of the members of its society (animals) themselves explained most of the prejudices and "class distinction", but the environments and cities were explored in a montage to a certain extent to explore a bit how these different creatures lived together. Here, there are so many obvious questions unanswered that it becomes distracting. You don't need to explain every single rule of how the world works but you still have to establish the grounds for an understandable story. I know the director drew inspiration from his childhood and his parents childhood into the story, and that's why I like it, it feels personal, it feels like I'm being let into the past and the heart of someone who cares. That's why it's more frustrating when some elements presented weren't explored or developed enough to make sense out of everything. So many questions needed to establish the backstory of this world and family: what was this other place the father had to leave from? How is it connected to the Elemental City? Are they the first immigrant family in the Elemental city? Are each element a different race? Why did they move to an abandoned neighborhood, and why was it abandoned? If the world was an allegory of New York or America, why is there only one-sided racism towards fire? I know it makes sense when talking about elements but do other couples combine too? Can they? Will they? The story seems to have a lot of firsts that the setting (inspired by the modern day) doesn't correlate to, if this allegory of the world we live in was as 1 to 1 as the movie presents it to be; this idea becomes a bit anachronistic.
If the fire people are seemingly the immigrants who are not given any help to settle in the Elemental society, are other elements being prejudiced against? And it is just unfortunate because I really believe there are some nuggets of good ideas but the script never takes any chances with it. In turn, every element becomes the most average version of itself: the rom com tropes feel retraced, the relationships father-daughter familiar and stereotyped, the family of the boyfriend somehow white-guilt-tripped.
Not to mention the character arcs. Amber has so much potential in the first half of the movie, boyfriend is a bit annoying but his heart is in the right place. But this is Amber's story, mostly because the boyfriend never had any motivation outside his job and her, he is a blank slate, and that's okay because Amber is the main protagonist. And what a waste. And mostly, her emotional moments were robbed from her: We never saw that Amber wanted to do something other than owning her father's shop, we never knew she wanted to do glass sculpting until bf's mom told her she should do it, and even then she thought no other alternative is to be thought off, only choice is the store; we never saw a inner conflict of her finding her true calling, she just "stumbled upon it", and when it was time for her to be honest with her dad, it was her bf who robbed her of that confession, he forced her to tell him in the worst possible time (in a bad way); she should have confessed that herself, out of courage and with the hope that her dad would understand and respect her choice; not to mention her dad never really lears to accept water people, we only learn he accepts her choice of not taking care of the shop. He never has a heart to heart with the one member of the society who has proven him the water people may not be that bad.
No only that, but during her entire upbringing, Amber was always shown excited to take care of the shop, we never thought she'd be intrigued in pursuing another career path, she went straight to what her father taught her. And then when we see she may not have the patience to deal with bad customers, this could have been a great opportunity to challenge her to be better. Or what I thought would actually happen, that her bf, who was shown to be good at expressing his feelings and hyping up people, would be the one with whom she would learn to cool down and not stress. The element's natural essence work wonders for this concept, she is fire so she can get irritated and blow up, but water is calming and soothing, he could have been the perfect element to combine with.
Unfortunately, the story was too focused on the particular themes it wanted to explore, too personal to the artist to let us into the world they created. The world-building was lacking because the story and characters were more important, and that's fine, but then the world of the elements is wasted in its conceptual potential. This story would have been completely fine as a live action or in a world with people. Zootopia had an overarching plot, a detective case used as a backdrop of their story, a way for the main characters to explore every aspect of the society they had presented. And applying prejudices and commentary on our current society.
The few emotional payoffs do not hit as hard because the story never delves into the intricaccies of any of the themes it presents. It tackles all of them well enough, but it feels shallow as we never get to see how certain prejudices or preconceptions affects the world around them. We learn the water people are actually the "high class" but we never see what the other elements are, and it's not like you can tell right away based on elemental hierarchy because there is no preestablished hierarchy like we can find in the Animal kingdom. The movie rushes through everything and never takes a moment to breath, to settle in the notions it establishes. If anything, the biggest emotional payoff was the salute betwen daughter and father at the end, harkening back to the flashback scene with the dad. It's just that movies like Turning Red have represented this aspect of mix-cultures better than in this movie,
The movie doesn't know what it wants to be, it starts being a "passing the baton" from father to daughter where she must prove she is up to the task, then finds a conflict in that she must calm down in order to do a good job and then she worries about fixing the water fissure so that her dad doesn't learn that the pipes bursting was her fault even though it wasn't her fault because it was the water dam who was at fault so it wasn't really her fault; and yet later suddenly is told she is good at doing glassware and she suddenly decides to leave and.... I just, don't understand the correlation between any of the resolutions of this story. I know on paper they make sense how things "could" be connected, but we never see them connect.
Again, my conclusion to this movie is, I applaud PIXAR for not doing a sequel and creating a new style and world; it says a lot about their capacity to create new worlds and the animation is amazing; it's just that the story retreaded a lot of familiar beats, never trying to tell something new or use its unique world to flesh out new ideas and concepts. I can see the story had personal significance to the director and I'd love to see more of these sort of personal stories and unique perspectives about society; just make sure you also deliver an impactful climax and emotionally resonating but also well-fleshed out pay-offs. But definitely this is the better path for a better PIXAR.