I found myself spending a good chunk of the new PIXAR film "Elemental" staring at Wade Ripple's hair. Well, Wade (Mamoudou Athie) doesn't have hair because he's a guy made of water, so I was looking at the ever-undulating waves on the top of his watery head that had been shaped to look like hair. It's a great reminder of why the PIXAR animation studio has had so many imitators over the years but few real rivals. Even though their house style is starting to feel a little old fashioned since the "Spider-verse" movies popularized 2D/3D hybrid animation, nobody matches up to PIXAR when it comes to the resources spent on making their films real works of art. They take time to get all the little details right - like the leading man's liquid locks.
A lot of the chatter around "Elemental" over the summer had to do with its marketing, which was pretty terrible. The ads and trailers made "Elemental" look formulaic and bland, another project where PIXAR anthropomorphized something inanimate and gave them feelings. What it completely failed to show was how beautifully this was all executed. In "Elemental," the characters are earth, water, air, and fire "elements" who share the bustling Element City together, though not without some friction. Our heroine, fire element Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis), is the daughter of Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen) and Cinder (Shila Ommi), an immigrant pair who run a small store in a fire element neighborhood on the edge of the city. Element City isn't built for fire elements, since the other three groups got there first, and there are many prejudices and misconceptions for their community to overcome.
"Elemental" reminds me of "Zootopia," in a very good way. There is an absolutely stunning amount of creativity and ingenuity that went into all the worldbuilding. I've seen several animated films lately that have maybe one or two clever ideas in each scene. "Elemental," on the other hand, is absolutely jam packed with them, and some sequences are just one gag or pun or fun visual after another. Ember and Wade, our star-crossed lovers, are constantly having to problem solve to simply exist in each other's worlds. Ember always carries an umbrella to guard against accidental splashes that might put her out, and has to dim herself down in a movie theater. When she goes to visit Wade's apartment, of course it's mostly submerged, so she spends the evening perched on an inflatable floatie chair. As for Wade, he's forever trying to sneak around Ember's father, who has a hatred of all things watery. There's a lot of hiding in crevices and vases.
The visuals are a treat, but more importantly director Peter Sohn and writers John Hoberg, Kat Likkel, and Brenda Hsueh figured out how to tell a very sweet, heartful story in this universe. Yes, it's a romantic comedy about opposites who attract. Tempestuous Ember and gushing Wade are a delightful pair to watch fall in love. But beyond this, "Elemental" is a surprisingly nuanced second-generation immigrant experience allegory. The biggest roadblock to Ember and Wade's relationship is actually Ember's sense of duty and guilt about her parents, especially her ailing father. They sacrificed everything for her happiness, so Ember feels it's only right for her to sacrifice her happiness for them. I also appreciate that this is a movie that points out racism (or elementism?) as a problem, but doesn't devote the whole narrative to it, and doesn't have the heroes try to solve the whole situation in one swoop. Instead, it's just something that they have to learn to patiently deal with, person by person, like the problem customers at the Lumens' shop.
Sohn drew from his background as a Korean immigrant who grew up in New York, but the fire elements are a stand-in for just about any immigrant community. There's a big influence from Studio Ghibli here on the character designs - the water elements are straight out of "Ponyo," and the fire elements all seem to be variations on Calcifer the fire demon from "Howl's Moving Castle." The challenge of using CGI to animate non-solid characters must have been considerable. There's also something very Ghibli-esque about the storytelling, which is built on a lot of little incidental encounters and slice-of-life scenes. Mysterious leaks and the store being in danger aren't because of any major villains or evil schemes, but because of larger systemic problems that can't be easily resolved.
Maybe I reacted so well to "Elemental" because I went in with low expectations. There's evidence of a lot of frantic rewriting behind the scenes, and you could point to a dozen other recent films that have tackled parts of this story more elegantly. The element allegory is just plain messy at certain points, and you really have to ignore some of the logic gaps. Still, this feels like PIXAR returning to form in a way that I haven't seen since before the pandemic. And it's definitely a step in the right direction.
---
No comments:
Post a Comment