BEFORE: OK, this one's a good intro for the romance chain, I think, if the film follows the formula I think it does. Man, I've avoided this one for a good long time, because it looked very very stupid in the trailers. Do we need a city that has all the different elements living in it, as personified versions of fire, air and water? No, I'm thinking we do not. This just feels like "Zootopia" only without the animals.
Normally I would try to work in an animated feature as soon as possible, like just put it at the top of the list and I'll drop it in at the first opportunity, but honestly I probably would have been OK never getting to this one, I'm only watching it now because I need it for the linking. Mamoudou Athie carries over from "The Burial" and I'm really not expecting much tonight.
THE PLOT: Follows Ember and Wade in a city where fire-, water-, earth- and air-residents live together.
AFTER: Yeah, this started out just as dumb as I thought it would - nothing makes sense or bears any resemblance to reality at all. Not that an animated feature NEEDS to do that, animation studios can make just about anything happen in a movie - but OK, then why THIS? Who was just itching to tell a story about a fire character who falls in love with a water character? What does that even mean? Is this all a metaphor for people of different backgrounds who hook up in our country's melting pot cities? Yeah, I guess so, but you know it's also a formula, you have different characters with different traits and you throw them together, have some external conflict that they have to unite to battle against, and maybe a disagreement or two while they're also falling for each other without realizing it.
You might as just well make an animated story about a penguin and a polar bear falling in love at a zoo, one's from the North Pole and the other's from the South Pole so they don't get along, except that they both LOVE eating fish, and the problem is that the polar bear also loves eating the penguin's seal friends. Call it "Polar Opposites" and sell that to Dreamworks for a couple million, just follow the same formula as this one, Zootopia, and countless others. But maybe zoo films are old hat now that they had "Madagascar" films and "The Wild" and also the remake of "Dumbo", "The One and Only Ivan" and so on.
"Elemental" takes place on some weird alternate world where there are four distinct races that correspond with earth, air, fire and water. So these are the "old school" elements, not like nickel and uranium and oxygen and palladium. From a simpler time, when doctors used leeches and treated the body based on whether it had too much bile or phlegm instead of giving vaccines and checking blood pressure. The races come from different countries like "Fireland" and I don't know why some of them all want to move to this big city where they can interact with others - I mean, if a water character can kill a fire character that easily, just by getting it wet, should they really be living that close to each other? This is where the metaphor breaks down completely, because there's nothing inherently life-threatening about people of African, Asian and European descent living side-by-side. Sure, there may be race-based disputes, but that's a social problem, not a health problem. A fire character can burn everything around her by losing control, and so it's physically dangerous for an earth character to even hang out with her, and a water character, forget it, he'd turn to steam if she got too close.
Ember's parents moved to the city from Fireland, we find out later there was a storm and they lost their home, so that meant they had to move away? I don't know, some issue between Bernie and his father, more likely. But this is a world where once you move away, you just can't move back, for some reason. So that's it, they have to live in this city and raise their daughter Ember. Nobody will rent them an apartment at first, because they'd probably burn it down just by living in it, hey, isn't that elemental racism? They buy a multi-story building instead, which NITPICK POINT, looks like it's made of wood, so umm, how is that going to work? And they open a store on the ground floor that sells fire-related stuff and food that fire creatures want to eat, I know, it doesn't make a lot of sense but still that's where we find ourselves.
Ember dreams of taking over the store one day, but the customers are always so annoying that she ends up losing her temper and flaming up, so her father doesn't think she's ready to run the store until she learns to control this. One of her flare-ups causes a leak in the basement pipes and somehow a water character comes into her life that way, which is only weird because there should be no running water in Firetown, because duh, it's not Watertown. So why DOES their building have pipes with water in them that leak all over the place? The movie spends the rest of its time not really answering that question, unfortunately. I figured it might be like the L.A. seen in "Chinatown", meaning that the answer would only come after they found out a government official had a child with his own daughter. Oh, right, this is a Disney film, forget that.
Anyway, Wade, the water guy, is forced to report all the violations in this building, and that means that the store is probably going to be shut down, but he does feel BAD about filing all those citations, so he and Ember go off to plead her case to his supervisor, who's attending some weird sport-ball came where the players are cloud characters. Gale, the cloud-like supervisor, agrees that it's a weird mystery that there's running water in Firetown, so if the two can team up to solve that mystery in three days, she'll tear up the violations. Yeah, this is just not how government works, kids. City inspectors are not supposed to fall in love with the residents of properties they inspect, and the supervisors are not supposed to waive violations just because there's something moderately unusual about the building.
Only child Ember also has dinner with Wade's very large family, and she learns that some families are fun (even if they cry a lot) and not every set of parents expect their children to take over the family business, some parents let their kids find their own path and follow their dreams using their artistic talents. Yeah, I dig where this story is coming from, God knows I didn't want to stay in Massachusetts and take over my dad's trucking business, I would have been miserable and I'm just not cut out for making early morning deliveries. Thank God his company folded before I could be old enough, ooh, darn, sorry Dad, looks like I'll have to go to New York and enter film school instead! We're good, right?
But if there's any sort of vibe I'm getting from the different races, the Fire people ALMOST come across as Asian-American - strong work ethic, family has plans for their daughter's career, helicopter parents almost, and those kol-nuts look a bit like round dumplings. Plus everything's red, and that's a color we associate with China, so that all kind of makes this film very appropriate for - Chinese New Year? Maybe? Look, I don't have anything else even close, I already watched "Turning Red" a couple years back. Whatever, they could just as easily be a metaphor for Eastern Europeans or Irish or something else, I'm just saying I got an Asian vibe. Disney's all DEI with their casting now so any film's roster needs to look like the United Nations anyway. (I'm not that far off - director Peter Sohn based Ember's parents on his own, who emigrated from Korea to the Bronx.)
The movie gets better in the second half, when everybody sort of stops fighting with each other and they have to work together to try to save the shop in Firetown from a giant flood. Well, at least the water character knows a bit more about how to handle all that water, but Wade and Ember get trapped together in the store's back room, they can't climb out and the other exits are blocked, meanwhile the temperature is rising because of Ember's panic and Wade's close to turning completely to steam, and really they only JUST figured out how they could touch each other and even kiss without his water extinguishing her flame or her flame boiling away all his water. Yeah, I'd still kind of like to see the paperwork on this, they just spent the WHOLE movie telling us they could never touch and then they just, do it? HOW? This kind of reminded me of Rogue and Gambit from the X-Men, who were in love but couldn't touch without her stealing his memories and powers and him blacking out. Don't worry, the next writer will find a way, most likely by forgetting that the problem existed in the first place.
This is still a very far-fetched premise with more than a fair number of bad ideas in it. So I stand by my initial impression.
Directed by: Peter Sohn
Also starring the voices of Leah Lewis (last seen in "The Half of It"), Ronnie del Carmen (last heard in "Soul"), Shila Ommi, Wendi McLendon-Covey (last seen in "Paint"), Catherine O'Hara (last seen in "Beetlejuice Beetlejuice"), Mason Wertheimer, Ronobir Lahiri (last seen in "Igby Goes Down"), Wilma Bonet (last seen in "8MM"), Joe Pera, Matt Yang King, Clara Lin Ding, Reagan To, Jeff LaPensee, Ben Morris, Jonathan Adams, Alex Kapp, P.L. Brown, Innocent Onanovie Ekakitie, Krysta Gonzales, Ava Kai Hauser, Maya Aoki Tuttle
RATING: 4 out of 10 sandbags
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