Elemental (2023)

 

Elemental (2023)

 

6/10

 

Starring the voices of

Leah Lewis

Mamoudou Athie

Ronnie del Carmen

Shila Ommi

 

Directed by Peter Sohn

 

It is easy to see why this movie will not break the bank in comparison to other Pixar movies. Watching it myself, and I was feeling a huge disconnect between me and the characters. The animation is the same top-notch you will expect from Pixar, but the story is so boring at the start. I was twenty minutes in, and the whole inability to control her temper (Ember) and the chasing of the official had me yawning.

The animation is Pixar’s twenty-seventh, and it is about a world which inhabits anthropomorphic elements of nature. This romantic comedy is about two crossed elements, water and fire, falling in love. They meet in a convenience store owned by Mr Lumen, a fire element. He runs the store with his daughter Ember, while his wife reads the future for lovers in their apartment. The family has one issue, Ember struggles to keep her emotions in check, and very early on we see her flare up when people become increasingly annoying.

How did the two meets?

Well, Wade a water element city inspector gets mistakenly sucked into their plumbing and notes many infractions which can lead to the store being shut down.

It was the chase and the trying to save their store that led to the connection with the two characters, one who has issues keeping his tears from falling all the time and the other who has issues keeping her anger from flaming up. The Lumen’s store is getting flooded, and the source of this flood is unknown, Wade and Ember go above the city looking for the source, so they can save the Lumen’s shop from being shut down. The movie then flipped into a full-blown romance thing where we see these two fall in love and try to make it work, while hiding from the Papa and Mama Lumen.

The switch to romance is where I start to wonder how this movie will be very appealing to children that they will want to see this again. There is a part of knowing your audience that this movie fails to nail down. Is this movie for children to enjoy the animations, or for adults to see how two people not meant to have any form of attraction to one another fall in love.

I think since the time the idea of this movie was conceived, a lot has changed and studios need to cut the expense of movies or go with the time. The amount of blockbuster movies coming out week in, week out is too much. So, movies like this will not make it if there is nothing extremely catchy that will pull the right audience to go see it again and again. The time of making money because the movie is a Pixar animation has come and gone.