Disney is considered quite a controversial brand these days for its often lazy practices and political stances, to which the company has ultimately lost much of its magic in the pursuit of generating money by any means necessary. Remakes that remove the soul from original creations, to overpriced park experiences that just seem completely out of touch. It is hard to say where Disney is really going from here on as it appears that many of its franchises it banks on are actually losing steam. Its Marvel television series have not been met with warm welcomes, either receiving little viewership or mockery online for their cheap special effects. Star Wars seems mostly dead. A somewhat ignored area of Disney is facing its own quiet problems: its animation studios. The world of animation in the present is often referred to as the worst in its history by professionals. People have discussed the insane difficulty of getting a film or series greenlit, while others have decided to abandon the traditional release method as a result, going for crowdfunded initiatives and releasing to YouTube directly. Even the most popular of shows do not survive the cruel hand of the animation industry, having managed to greenlit: The Owl House got cancelled for having an audience that was considered too adult by Disney.
We like to believe that Pixar is a division of Disney that is immune to much of these issues, with the established idea that Pixar holds a bigger stamp of approval that is placed upon anything that exits its doors. Reality is this is no longer the case, as the studio has managed to throw out less and less well received films as the years come by, perhaps with some more frequency, but less of a cultural impact. To be specific: how many of Pixar's recent films do you see people talking about? Or perhaps even just referencing? I believe a bit part of this is how Pixar has decided to take itself forward as a studio, removing much of the magic it had in telling fun stories with unique characters, and almost just doing the same thing over and over. With the release of Elemental, jokes across the internet appeared on how Pixar just pursues very easy ideas and characters these days, promoting a very blatant agenda alongside them. Their stories often being about something relatively deep or meaningful in the modern world, and less about the use of fun adventure.
There's no problem with wanting to add meaningful messages to your films, and animation is a great way to do this given the creative potential it offers in exploring such diverse, imaginative worlds. But Elemental seems like a new low in how the studio does this. Going for a very on the nose idea. It took me a while to finally watch this as a result of the negativity that came from its release, the rumours and the concerns of it being a major flop. Critics even panned Elemental for its lazy approach to a narrative; something we didn't even see with the recent controversial Turning Red. I don't believe a lot of the controversy for either films was justified, honestly. Turning Red wasn't so bad, albeit again a bit lacking in adventure. And Elemental certainly isn't terrible either. The main issue? It just doesn't feel like Pixar has an imagination anymore.
Elemental
If you could think of today's annoying controversies and politically induced rage bait, a lot of it stems from race. This entire subject is something massive that I refuse to get into, but it holds relation to Elemental. Ultimately, Elemental is a story on race. In this world, there are different elements, these elements do not live in harmony for obvious reasons: they don't quite get along. Water and fire don't quite go well together, for example. First off, the weirdness here is that Elemental seems to be a story on learning to put aside race and work together to solve problems, but naturally these elements don't really work together no matter what. I'm not quite sure what they were going for exactly, but the idea in general is a bit flawed. It almost argues against the very thing Pixar is trying to advocate for. Anyway, with this world, elements don't really mix in society. There's a type of segregation as a result, where the elements ultimately judge and hate each other. There's a lot of blatant references to race mixing here, where Elemental straight up has characters saying not to do it. It's very odd. A lot of the film's introduction is setting up this idea between elements, showing the society and the differences, mostly from the fire perspective.
Truthfully, the main narrative doesn't really have much else to it. Two characters get together from different elements and slowly try to convince the rest to live in peace together, removing stereotypes and finding a way to solve mutual problems. I can see why critics found this quite lackluster, and it certainly does seem like Pixar has lost its way when it comes to creating imaginative characters and stories. It all seems too easy of an idea to just elements and make some political references. While many characters and ideas of the past are often thought of with connections to various themes, these ones just seem a bit shallow. There were no real memorable characters or events, and some of this weakness comes from an unimaginative use of music. There's a lot of relatively famous songs that play, which made it harder to immerse in the world and connect with it. This is a bit of a disappointment given the world itself actually doesn't look that bad.
While again, a bit unimaginative, Elemental's world is full of colour. A highly vibrant world that you can find yourself often wanting to pause and look through the images in order to capture all of the detail. In terms of animation, it's certainly quite beautiful in parts. Though, equally I saw certain objects and scenes that seemed a bit off, as if the assets had been imported from elsewhere and thrown into the film alongside the other animation style. Perhaps this is a result of the computer generated style, which can sometimes look a bit awkward. Nothing particularly new and often visible in some of Pixar's older films. It is a shame how lackluster the narrative is, because Elemental really does have a world full of so much colour that it makes you want to see more of it, hoping that somewhere, there might be something more to it that isn't just an elemental version of regular cities. With this, the character animations also don't look all that interesting. Perhaps a result of the aforementioned lack of memorable characters. I would pin it down to that more than anything else.
To say whether I enjoyed or disliked Elemental is difficult. The film is definitely nothing special. But it isn't terrible either. I don't think you're missing out on anything by not watching it, that's for sure. And I wouldn't say it's bad. But I do think it isn't worthy of the Pixar name, and it really doesn't manage to stick with you in any way. It seems like your average animated film that may have been released by a studio you haven't really heard of over a decade ago, ultimately. Would I recommend it? Not really. Save your time and watch something a bit better, and almost two hours in runtime, Elemental doesn't quite deserve the time, nor does it do anything that justifies it.
