Elemental Review: A Heartwarming Love Story That Suffers From Deficient World-Building

Director: Peter Sohn

Writers: John Hoberg, Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh

Cast: Leah Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Ronnie del Carmen, Shila Ommi, Wendi McLendon-Covey and Catherine O'Hara

Runtime: 102 minutes

Streaming on: Disney+ Hotstar

In Element City, anthropomorphised embodiments of the four elements live in apparent harmony. The animated metropolitan setting of Disney-Pixar’s Elemental (2023) is modelled after New York City, a melting pot of diverse cultures and ethnicities. As our fiery protagonist Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis) puts it, however, “Element City isn’t made with Fire people in mind.” With its canals, fountains and elevated water channels, Fire people are made to feel unwelcome in Element City, choosing instead to live in their own neighbourhood on the outskirts of the metropolis. The film follows the romance between Ember — who feels burdened by the sacrifices of her hard-working immigrant parents, and whose family is deeply distrustful of Water — and Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie), a gentle city inspector with a penchant for bursting into tears. When Fire and Water meet, sparks fly and steam hisses. Inevitably, the two fall in love despite their differences, creating their own version of a happily-ever-after. 

Insiders vs. Outsiders

Like Elemental, Disney’s 2016 film Zootopia — which won the Academy Award and Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature — functioned as an allegory for systemic racism in America, with the city of Zootopia being divided into Preys and Predators, the latter being a minority group who were regarded as violent and savage creatures, othered by the rest of the city’s inhabitants. Indeed, the opening scene of Elemental feels reminiscent of the “Try Everything” sequence from Zootopia, in which Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) moves to the big city for the first time, and is overwhelmed by the sights around her, animals of all shapes and sizes thriving in one place. We see Ember’s parents take their nervous first steps in Element City, which is full of Water, Earth and Air people but not very many Fire people, who are the last element to have immigrated to the city. They are immediately treated with disdain by the other elements, although it is not clear why. Their flames pose little risk to the city or its people; and even so, all the element people seem more or less indestructible, bouncing back to shape after any kind of damage — fire regains its strength by ingesting wood or lighter fluid, leaves on trees grow back on their own, a disgruntled cloud immediately reshapes itself after a vehicle runs through it, and Wade is brought back to watery life even after every drop of him is vaporised in the climax of the film. 

Shaky World-building

The world of Elemental is charming but not as compelling as it sounds in theory, especially given that it comes from the studios that brought us stirring films like Toy Story (1995), Finding Nemo (2003), Up (2009), Inside Out (2015) and Coco (2017). The elemental world and its fraught power dynamics are never explored in depth, with the film focusing instead on Ember’s romance and personal journey, from grappling with her parents’ expectations of her to finding the courage to pursue her own dream. Elemental came out on the heels of films like Encanto (2021) and Turning Red (2022), which expertly deal with familial conflict and generational trauma. However, the story does not carry the emotional heft or refreshing originality of its predecessors, its world-building slightly shaky. What does the Blue Flame mean for the Fire people? Why is the Vivisteria Flower significant in this world? How/why can Ember’s mother “smell” true love? Is spontaneous wailing an inherently Water trait, or is it just Wade and his family who happen to be particularly weepy? Why do Ember’s parents refer to each other as “Bernie” and “Cinder” when these are names assigned to them by an ignorant official who couldn't be bothered to learn how to pronounce their Firish names? 

In contrast, the Firebenders are shown to be the primary aggressors in Nickelodeon's excellent animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender, in which the four elements are divided into separate nations with corresponding elemental powers. They use their firepower to subdue and colonise the other nations, and the rest of the elemental world must come together to resist the Fire Nation’s invasion. This fundamental premise is established within thirty seconds of the show’s introduction, giving the viewer a solid understanding of the power dynamics at play, as well as a hint of the story to come. In Elemental, information on each element’s position in the prevailing hierarchy remains scant, their backstories leaving much to be desired. All we know is that Water is dominant, while Fire is marginalised. 

Ember and Wade appear to be the only inter-elemental couple in Element City. The technicalities of a love story between Fire and Water require a suspension of disbelief that makes you wonder if it has limitations as an allegory for inter-racial romance. In fact, the writers of the film had initially suggested that Elemental would end with Ember and Wade having a baby made out of steam. This concept did not make the final cut, and is presumably something that will be explored in a potential sequel. In the film’s actual ending, Ember’s family’s attitude towards the other elements (especially Water) has softened considerably, but the rest of the world ostensibly continues to be just as unwelcoming towards Fire people. 

Stunning Animation and All-Heart Storytelling

The film drags in parts (a bit about Wade pretending to be a food inspector is a tad longer than it needs to be), its messaging a little too on the nose (“Why does anyone get to tell you what you do in your life?” Wade asks Ember). But despite its flaws, Elemental is all heart. The storytelling comes from a place of love, drawing from the director’s own experience growing up in New York City as a son of Korean immigrants. The romance, the opposites-attract trope in its most literal form, is sweet; voice-actor Mamoudou Athie is particularly endearing as Wade. 

The chief triumph of the film, though, is its animation, which comes to life in the sweeping shots of Element City and all its beautiful bustle. One night, Ember and Wade fly across the city in a hot-air balloon — an enormous full moon peeks out from behind columns of tall, twisty buildings made of tempered glass, each of them reflecting different hues of light, while narrow canals (inspired by those of Venice and Amsterdam) wind their way through the ground. The concept of the four elements lends itself to fun, creative visuals in the film. On their first official date, Ember leaps across crystallised rocks, acquiring the bright colours of the mineral underneath her; Wade glides over a lake and creates a shimmering rainbow in his wake. The scene in which Ember and Wade discover that they can touch each other (without dangerous consequences for either of them) is moving. In the most memorable frame of the film, the two of them slow-dance under the arches of a canal, the colourful lights of Element City twinkling away in the backdrop.

The animation, which was reportedly time-consuming and expensive, looks hyper-realistic at times, such as when the channel water spills over the edges and gushes forth, flooding the city’s canals. In Elemental, light and colour bounce off and shine through reflective surfaces. Each of the anthropomorphic elements are in constant motion, sporting a variety of emotions. Pixar’s VFX team revealed that they made use of AI to create the Fire people’s natural, ever-flickering flames. The film’s soothing, new-age music is composed by the prolific Thomas Newman, who has scored three Pixar films in the past. The storyline is clichéd and simplistic, and there are more element puns than strictly necessary, but Elemental manages to be pleasantly heart-warming, if not nearly as profound or affecting as some of the studios’ previous projects.

Elemental was a rare post-pandemic Disney-Pixar film that saw a theatrical release, as opposed to directly hitting the Disney+ streaming platform. After an underwhelming opening at the box-office, the film emerged as a sleeper hit. Despite the SAG-AFTRA strikes that went on for much of last year, the film is in good company at the Golden Globes, nominated alongside Makoto Shinkai’s Suzume, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, and Marvel’s critically acclaimed Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse.