Elemental: Savoring Pixar's Fading Light

I’ve only been doing this writing thing for a short while. But in that space, I have been surprised at many of the developments I’ve gotten to witness unfolding in the popular film landscape.

It was only five years ago, for example, that superhero movies were still thought to be unstoppable. Here in 2025, though, we know better. But the wheels coming off the Marvel machine accompanied a shift in their whole method of production and distribution, and it didn’t take long for the natural consequences to catch up with them as verifiable issues started appearing in their films.

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

No. The development that has most surprised me has been critics and their slow-motion break-up with Pixar.

The only way I know how to describe what I’ve seen over the last five years … imagine that your roommate has been stuck for a long time dating a girl who was obviously bad for him, and after he finally breaks up with her he gets back into the dating ring. All the girls he takes out are perfectly fine, but he keeps finding the randomest of faults. You look at this guy, who has been in healthy relationships before, who feels so burned by this one breakup that he’s just turning away all these perfectly viable candidates until you’re not even sure what it is he’s looking for.

And that's more or less how I feel when I read a certain Nicholas BBC piece where the author tries to explain that the reason movies like ELIO flop has nothing to do with the streaming wars or the stigma around animation. Turns out, these movies are just too complicated for kids.

"There are too many scenes before Elio leaves Earth and reaches a psychedelic alien craft called the Communiverse. And then the film packs Elio off to a villain's spaceship. And then he's back in the Communiverse. And then he's on Earth. And then he's in the Communiverse again. And did I mention that there's an Elio clone on Earth for some of the time? It's hardly surprising if younger viewers aren't too sure of what he is doing and why."

    You wouldn’t guess going off just how condescending many of their reviews have been toward their recent works, but many of my favorite works from the studio have come out in the last five or so years. I’d say ONWARD is my favorite post-classical Pixar movie, but the movie that I think most represents what the world stands to lose if critics don’t get their act together, the movie I want to talk about today, is actually a little more recent.

Elemental is a 2023 animated film directed by Peter Sohn taking place in a universe inhabited by living embodiments of the four elements. Our protagonist, Ember, is the daughter of first-generation fire immigrants to the metropolis of Element City. Grateful for her parents' sacrifice, she wants to honor her father by taking over the shop her father built from the ground up when she comes of age. But when she crosses paths with an amiable water-person named Wade, Ember starts to reckon with her latent desires and what it really means to be the child of so much sacrifice. Sohn, described his inspiration for the film saying, 

“I grew up with parents that didn’t speak English. And so, a lot of the movies that we saw, they didn’t understand, I always had to translate them. But a lot of the animated movies that were told visually so well, I never had to translate anything for them, they could just watch it and enjoy the movie or get emotional over the animation. And that, for me as an animator is a goal of trying to make something universal that all can connect to in that empathetic way.

“It has been the struggle of my life for sure understanding my place and what have I assimilated or my identity being a bifurcated identity. It’s always been there, I assume that it’ll be always a part of some amount of storytelling – having that kind of that diversity. Will it be a major thing? I don’t know. But it’s been a part of my life. And I love trying to reflect what the teams that we’ve worked with their lives and our lives into the work that we do.”

         I basically always have an appointment with each new Pixar or Disney film. But I was not necessarily expecting to love this movie. I was not expecting this to rank among my favorite Pixar movies. The biggest thing on my mind was that this movie was directed by the same guy who did The Good Dinosaur, arguably Pixar’s worst movie at the time. And so I wasn’t totally sure where this was going to land.

        But the movie quickly earned its mettle with me. I thought the script was both smart and endearing, and after years of Pixar movies being relegated straight to Disney+, the big screen visuals were a welcome retreat. I think the moment I knew I was sold was the “first date” montage. That’s really when I knew that all the parts of the movie were coming together for me. The narrative engine, the characters riding it, etc. This is when I knew that all the visual gags and the way the animation exploited the element-ness of the world worked for me. And by the end with Ember and Wade finally embracing, I knew that Pixar had another solid hitter on its belt.

And yet, the movie still found itself in the same class as ONWARD, as Turning Red, and more recently, as ELIO. And I don’t think we can stay here forever. There are all sorts of dark clouds looming over the film industry as a whole right now with the casualties of the streaming wars, the creep of generative AI, the continued consolidation of film studios and markets, and so on. We have no guarantee what film will look like five years from now, or whether it will still even be here. The time may not be far off where something like Elemental, an artist-driven film made by committed storytellers persevering in a turbulent market, actually feels like a nostalgic relic for all of us. 

When I talk about Pixar’s light fading, I’m not referring to its creative flame somehow dying because they are losing the capacity to make brilliant films, at least not yet. But in a future where critics cease to reward a film’s novelty, excellence, or even its aspiration for these things, we also can’t pretend that these things won’t cease to matter for filmmakers, and that will absolutely have real impact on not just Pixar specifically, but film as a whole.

But until such a time, we have things to talk about.

 

Critics’ Breakup with Pixar

In the recent New York Times poll for Best 100 movies of the 21st century, we got three films from Pixar, and no one is surprised by which movies they picked: WALL-E, Ratatouille, and UP. Only one other animated film, Spirited Away, made the list, passing on movies like Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse, How to Train Your Dragon, Waking Life, any other anime film, and all films from Disney Animation. 

These Pixar movies aren’t the ones that see a lot of representation in the theme parks, but their premises are very tasty for film critics, which is why they’d be the ones to end up on this kind of list. Their more cerebral plotlines and philosophical musings can make Charles Smitherson with his post-graduate in Anthropology from Harvard feel good about watching a cartoon without worrying that his buddies are going to revoke his invitation to the reunion. These were the Pixar movies that had the easiest time being accepted by critics upon premiere. They are, in essence, the movies that are least likely to be mistaken for “kid’s movies.

    But the movies that built Pixar were the colorful adventure films that play well with kids. A movie like Finding Nemo is far more analogous to something like ONWARD than something like WALL-E. This makes it interesting that I run into so many thought pieces and reviews that will point to something like Elemental not having the same “spark” as Toy Story. Most of this essay will see me dissecting all this film’s moving parts and the things that make it work as a piece of cinema.

But I also want to talk for a moment about this film’s financial run. Part of the reason why I’m spotlighting Elemental with this essay is that its box office performance wound up being really bizarre, and I don’t just mean specifically in the framework of Pixar films. Players like Pete Docter, Head of Pixar animation, already kind of knew that the film was facing an uphill battle. He shared just before Elemental’s premiere, 

"In the long run, there’s been a bit of a mixed blessing because we’ve trained audiences that these films will be available for you on Disney+. And it’s more expensive for a family of four to go to a theater when they know they can wait and it’ll come out on the platform."

    And Docter’s nerves appeared to be founded. The film actually had a devastating opening. Variety reported on Elemental’s opening weekend, “But there’s no sugar-coating the debut of “Elemental,” which landed by far the worst start in modern history for Pixar …”

         About three weeks into its run, the movie had only slightly dipped in its box office returns. And so Variety gave a slightly more optimistic assessment, saying, “The animated romance has no hope of recouping its $200 million production budget domestically, but it has held well since its disastrous opening and has now pushed beyond a $100 million domestic gross.”

    But a month later, outlets like The Hollywood Reporter had to start taking notice that this sucker wasn’t going anywhere. “The Pixar movie cleared the $400 million mark at the global box office on Tuesday, becoming the first Hollywood animated movie based on original IP to do so since before the pandemic.”

So the movie got a blue moon box office redemption. Its interaction with critics wasn’t quite as merciful. Some critics did receive it gratefully. Ben Croll of The Wrap described,

“The filmmakers really do mine these elements for their full potential, delighting us as Water spectators do the wave in a very literal way at a sports match, or as Ember realizes her glass-making potential upon a trip to the beach. While playful and pun-forward, ‘Elemental’ always takes this world seriously, finding great visual wit in the ways fire, water, land and air interact with one another in a shared metropolis that resembles a coral reef.”

         But what’s been more common with Elemental, and other recent Pixar movies, has been the prominence of responses like what we got from The Hollywood Reporter.

"It’s all there — so much so that Elemental may be the first work from Pixar to feel like it was generated entirely by AI. Not just the AI computing all the imagery, but literally an algorithm putting together a perfect Pixar movie. The problem, of course, is that the originality is mostly absent here, as is the thematic risk-taking that drove films like Wall-E (the planet almost dies!) or Inside Out (Bing Bong dies!) or Coco (people die!)."

Amadeus (1984)

    These kinds of reviews have the silhouette of taste and intelligence. But one has to wonder to which movies they are comparing Elemental in order to arrive at these conclusions. Do the folks at The Hollywood Reporter not know there are ding-dongs on the internet who think that Casablanca is boring because “does this whole story seriously take place in one bar?” And what is “risk-taking” anyways? Is it really just as simple as characters dying?

         The movie that a lot of the reviews describe, and the diagnoses they try to project onto Elemental, they more or less reflect my relationship to Pixar’s BRAVE over ten years before. That movie featured a lot of technological innovations, and there are a lot of things that work about it in theory, but the narrative connectivity is just lacking for me. But that was still the kind of movie that The Academy would award Best Animated Film of the Year (over the much better Wreck-it Ralph) because of a certain fondness toward the Pixar brand.

         And my feelings toward that movie are also how I feel so comfortable in my assessment of Elemental as one of my favorite movies of the decade. Because despite what our friends at The Hollywood Reporter imagine, Elemental took quite a few risks, and they paid off for largely the same reason as those golden Pixar classics. 

        I spent most of the development of this essay wrestling with its direction. I had wondered if I was going to spend most of my time like taking down lazy criticism of the film. (My revision circle is constantly asking me when I'm just going to just get on with it and do a part 4 installment for my "Pixar Good" series ... one day, fellas.) But it eventually became clear that what this essay needed, and what a movie like Elemental deserved, was to simply recount the strengths and merits of what I genuinely consider one of my favorite films.

Probably the main drive of this essay is that Elemental as a film works for many of the same reasons as Finding Nemo, and so I’ll be examining this movie through many of the same lenses as I did when examining that film: writing, animation, and social context. This time, I actually want to start with writing because I believe that is where every good story actually begins. This is the real battleground on whether or not Elemental works as a vessel of film.

 

Writing

         An artist can start with an observation—that being a child of immigrants and building a new life in this new world can feel like a fire person falling in love with a water person—and it might take some time to figure out how exactly to phrase that idea. This is why it takes an animated film some seven years of development. In Peter Sohn’s words, 

Concept art by Jonathan Hoffman and Maria Yi

“People can see [fire] as a temper. People can see it as passion. As a practical thing, fire burns and sparks—but what does it mean to burn bright? There are all these ingredients to what we already perceive as fire, and that started to form Ember’s personality. It’s the same thing for Wade. Water can be transparent. What does that mean? He wears his emotions on his sleeve. He goes with the flow. That helped form these personalities that were already pretty opposite, and then we had to find that Venn diagram of where they overlapped. That’s the hopeful magic. I hope people can buy into the sparks, the chemical reaction, that could form a relationship.”

         The successful execution of these ideas is hard to measure or personify, but we nonetheless respond to a well-articulated story. Parts of the equation, though, can be understood through models and rules. 

Your standard film, for example, centers on some kind of conflict, some competition between two forces or ideas. We tend to think of conflict in terms of literal opposing entities fighting over the goodwill of society at large, especially as seen in something like an action-adventure film. Miles Morales in Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse absolutely has external obstacles that stand in the way of him putting the multi-verse back together. But really the story hinges on him believing in himself as a random kid in Brooklyn having the capacity to save the day.

        Many stories don’t even require some supervillain to conquer in order to have a gripping story. 12 Angry Men manages to derive a great deal of tension by shoving all its characters in one room for 80 minutes and have them work out the fate of this one kid in nothing but the conversations they have with one another. The stakes of the film are specific and localized, but the situation probes our questions about the blind spots in how we execute justice, both individually and systemically, and this is why we engage with it.

         A major problem that Pixar had during its sequel run in the 2010s was landing on a moderately interesting external conflict but starving the situation of any real character tension, (or just as often completely fabricating it from scratch). But even when there is a formidable external conflict, the situation winds up feeling somewhat limp unless it is underpinned by some gripping question about the human experience or compelling emotional stakes tokenized within the characters.

It Happened One Night (1934)

    And this is one thing that makes Elemental relatively unique in the landscape. When you look at the shape of the narrative in Elemental, the film is basically a rom-com, a genre with much lower stakes than, say, an adventure film. But once they make the jump to animation, the stakes and conflicts of most genres tend to inflate to fill the space afforded by a medium where literally anything is possible, a medium built on exaggeration and caricature.

The conflict of any compelling rom-com has the lovebirds seem mismatched at the start only to discover that their shared chemistry is sufficient to cover all that. And more, these differences help them cover their own blindspots and weak places. The fact that Wade and Ember are volatile elements is what keeps them apart in our minds, the fact that they should not abide the same space and could even put each other out. That looming potential outcome is the lubricant that gives their potential relationship so much charge. And that opposition is typified in all the baggage their relationship brings, all the reasons they should not work on paper. 

A Patch of Blue (1965)

    We could compare Ember and Wade to any of Sidney Poitier’s onscreen interracial couplings. The elemental divide between Ember and Wade is likened to members of two different races or cultural backgrounds coming together. And these films have a little more charge to them than your normal rom-com because they’re speaking to divisions that aren’t just rooted in human pride or ambition but literal social barriers. Even so, these films still rely on shared humanity as the ultimate solvent for the ills keeping any two hearts apart.

         Ember and Wade's chemical opposition is brought to the forefront in the climax where Wade allows himself to be evaporated so that both Ember and the blue flame representing her family’s heritage will survive the flood. Here, Wade surrendering himself completely for Ember, basically throwing himself into the chasm that was dividing them, is how he proves his love for her.

And this is actually another hangup I had going in. The promotional material put the inter-elemental love story plot front and center, and meanwhile Sohn was advertising this movie as a story about immigrants. I did not see how these two things fit together, and I had doubts about the movie’s ability to mix them. But in execution, this works really well because these two threads intersect in some very key ways. 

         We begin with Ember in a place where she believes she is perfectly aligned with her father’s vision of her future. She sees taking over his shop as the ultimate fulfilment of his sacrifice and of her love for him. Thus, the thing that pushes her out of her little corner of the city is chasing Wade and his citation ticket—a thing that is threatening the future of the shop. But rescuing the shop from being shut down forces her to see a space of the world that lies beyond Fire Town. Wade exposes her to new experiences and worldviews, and Ember’s arc has her finding the courage to tell her father that she wants to live her own life.

    The ability Ember has to pursue a relationship with someone outside her lane represents Ember being lured away from her own heritage and possibly neglecting her own culture. But at the same time, Ember’s ability to pursue someone of her own choosing, regardless of their background, is in many ways what Bernie and Cinder left their home to pursue. In this way, Ember’s choice to partner with Wade is the ultimate way of thanking her parents for their sacrifice. 

The external conflict begins as a battle over citation tickets, but by the end, we’ve forgotten all about that because we’re so concerned about whether or not these lovebirds are going to get together. Good conflicts also feed into one another. And when all the threads of your conflict just rest naturally together like this, that’s really when you know you’ve struck gold.       

 

Animation

         In the filmmaker’s commentary for the film, VFX supervisor, Sanjay Bakshi, described the technical challenges of the film, saying, “I always regret I wasn’t there to work on the first Toy Story or Monsters Inc. where they were really figuring out how to do this. And I feel like this was our chance to have that experience to just dive in and figure it out as we were going along.”

         To give a really basic overview of how computer animation works, you basically build a puppet in the computer and then insert literally hundreds of invisible hooks into this thing, all over its body and all over its face, that allow you to maneuver it so it can perform the needs of the story. This is a very exhausting task when dealing with a single corporeal form. A character like the Genie from Aladdin works really well in 2d animation where your only limit is how far you can bend a line, but that is darn near impossible to translate into computer animation. 

        Now imagine trying to stick these hooks into a puppet that is not solid—one that grows and shrinks, one whose hinges and joints are fluid, one that is see-through or even partially see-through. Now imagine that basically every character is like that. Now imagine trying to make it look like this is how animation is supposed to work. Sanjay Bakshi shared in an interview with Cartoon Brew,

“When Ember gets angry, for instance, that had to be choreographed by the delicate touch of an animator. We built controls so the animator could not just change Ember’s facial expression and body language; they also controlled the roiling nature of her fire. They could make the flames intensify and become more jagged, go from red to purple, and make her as bright as she can be. And those parameters controlled aspects of the fluid simulation. We invested a lot of time in building those controls so that the animator could create that performance. That was the dance that we had to do.”

    The sequence where Ember is chasing Wade across the city in the train and into city hall is basically one giant animation playground. Our first-person shooter gets to crash through people without killing them, squeeze herself in between cracks without squashing, and turn herself into a literal wall of fire. Honestly, I dare Disney to do a live-action remake of this. 

And the thing is, the story just isn’t interesting unless you bother to leap headfirst into also those visual gags. Sohn also shared in the commentary, “If they weren’t being exploited by the elements, why not just let them be human characters?” 

  And this creative configuration covers not just the element-based characters themselves, but also the world they live in. So much of this film’s load comes from the filmmakers building an entire universe for this story to unfold across. Don Shank described in The Art of Elemental, 

Concept Art by Jason Deamer

“… we wanted to have the architecture feel born out of the Element’s culture, but not just be simple one-to-one replacement. We started by having Fire characters live in giant cooking pots but quickly moved to building architecture that was assembled with parts and pieces of recognizable, real-world items that relate to fire, water, air, or earth. Certain large silhouette ideas like cooking pots still felt unique as a base to work from, and so we started stacking them to get taller buildings and to add an interest and complexity to the designs.

         And all those tricks the animators spent seven years breaking their software over trying to master? Well, it’s not just that they look pretty. Figuring out how to make the streams of light from the fire fracture and weave through a shimmering substance? It all serves to demonstrate just how magical it is when fire and water—these two things we thought could not possibly interact—come together and create something that makes your jaw just drop. There are so many moments in this film I want to freeze frame. There is no good reason why the movie has to look as good as it does.

    

    One of the many stunning sequences in this film, for example, comes when Wade takes Ember underwater in the air pocket to see the vivisteria flower. It’s just a stunning segment, made all the more cathartic because of what it represents for Ember’s story. This is something she has wanted to see all her life, but she has been made to feel that because she does not fit into this society, this is a privilege that will always be denied her. And so the miracle of her being able to enter this space and see this firsthand, it absolutely has to be described in this visual wonderland of light, color, and kineticism.

There’s a similar incentive to what we talked about in Avatar where the spectacle underlines a central theme while also advancing a character’s arc. As with all the spectacle in the film, the glorious display becomes the face to the beauty that awaits when these two opposing elements get to come together.

I’ve mentioned in both my essays on Belle and The Lion King that much of a film’s storytelling is carried by the visuals and the vessel you craft for your story. The silent-film classic, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, is a masterclass in telling your viewer what this story is about with little else but a distinct visual style. The crooked geometry of the architecture, the gaunt wardrobe and makeup, the harsh lights and darks, it all has you feeling like you’ve stepped into someone’s nightmare, which is more or less the situation of this film. 

Over a hundred years later, and a movie like Elemental faces this same basic task. How does the visual language of the film assist your audience in understanding this film? Element City as a whole is vibrant and colorful, underscoring a sense of possibility that comes when all sorts of unique parties come together to create something new. But there’s also a distinct visual style depending on which part of the world we’re occupying, and this creates a thematic dialogue within the narrative itself.

    We spend some time in both Ember and Wade’s world, and they feel like they exist in different realities. It’s not just that Wade’s world evokes “water” because everything’s so reflecty and glasslike and turquoise. It also feels very developed and bourgeois, contrasting Ember’s more rustic and warm environment. The fact that they’re fire and water is nothing—they’re upper class and lower class, and this is something the visuals of the film constantly remind us of.

And the expansive design process is another one of those things that can get severely disserviced in criticism, another thing we talked about with Mamoru Hosada's Belle. But without all that effort, you don’t really get just what a miracle it is for these two lovebirds to come together without that rainbow prism bursting through the swirling steam. There was no budget way to make this film.

    Part of the reason why I chose to talk about this film over other worthy Pixar movies of the 2020s is that the animation ambitions of building a cast and landscape of walking fireballs ... that most closely represents what Pixar as a studio has to lose if they decide they can't afford to keep dumping blockbuster-sized budgets for their animated films ($200 M). These movies are an investment. They are a gamble, not a guarantee.

 

Social Context

Metaphor is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there needs to be a logical link between the representation and the thing it is invoking (e.g. a carnivorous clown as a metaphor for childhood being a frightening battlefield where vulnerable children are preyed upon). But at the same time, there has to be some distance traveled—you need to use the metaphor to make connections between two unlike things to reveal something not readily apparent.

So, likening interracial relationships, or the experience of immigrating to a new country, to actual fire and water becomes this film’s metaphor. You couldn’t literally plug a human into these scenarios and have them come out the same. But at the same time, you’re never lost as to what experience is being explored. This metaphor expands on its subject while also creating a direct line to it.

    The intent isn’t really to say that fire people literally stand in specifically for Irish immigrants or Chinese immigrants, or that water represents white people. But rather, this situation exposes something about how anyone who’s been in this situation can see themselves in something as entertaining or visually stunning as this choreography of fire and water coming together. Playing around in this simulation can teach you something about a specific life experience.

    And there’s a lot represented here. Assimilation and the fear of cultural deterioration. Systemic racism. Unchecked microaggression. A lot of these onscreen displays of element-ism can be directly traced to real-life immigrant accounts and what it's like to try making a life for your family in a new world. Peter Sohn himself described, 

"Growing up, I always saw my parents a certain way, but then when I hit my 20s and got a real job versus working at my family shop, I saw them as people. That shift from parents to people affected me a great deal. All the stories they told me of their journey here I took for granted until I was like, 'Oh my God, they did this without speaking the language. They did this with no money. My dad was a hotdog cart guy and he made all this. I could never do that.' My empathy grew for them."

    1993’s The Joy Luck Club has kind of become a touchstone for cinematic depictions of the immigrant experience. Based on the novel by Amy Tan and directed by Wayne Wang, this movie was a milestone for children of immigrants getting to tell their own stories on a large canvas. The story follows four Chinese women who cross the seas to America seeking a better life, and their legacies are tracked in how their American-born daughters bear the torch their mothers handed to them in coming to this new country. There’s a dual expectation for these girls to make their mark in this new country while also holding on to their cultural heritage. And learning to do both impossible things is wrapped up in mother and daughter coming together. 

This movie helped establish many patterns for onscreen representations of the immigrant experience, especially as it plays out across generations. Elemental weaves in most of these threads. Ember feels the pull between honoring her parents’ sacrifice competing with her desire to follow her heart—as typified by both her love for Wade and her ambition to follow her own career path. Part of what Ember gets to learn is that this sense of possibility is the ultimate fruit of her father’s sacrifice. 

An important layer to Ember’s actualization is that it’s not really about her denying her essence or her heritage. Her passion for glass-making, for example, is intricately tied to her innate gifts as a fire-person. The leap comes from her following this path as it leads her away from the expectations held by her culture, but in choosing to finesse this craft, Ember is embracing what makes her unique in this ecosystem. This unique expression of her abilities becomes the way she carries her heritage into the heart of the larger culture.

         Something else worth discussing as it relates to multiculturalism in fantasy is that popular storytelling has been banking on the stories of immigrants or racial minorities for a while now. The main conflict of something like Star Wars doesn’t make sense without our real life context for things like imperialism—of the dominant global power trying to subdue a smaller system, and that system fighting back.

    These fantastical settings are generally assumed to not have the same social dynamics and histories as this world. But because they are being produced in a stratified world, Hollywood’s impulse has long been to use that template to represent the dominant class. Hence, every Hollywood franchise has followed the plight of white characters taking back their power from other white characters.

It’s only really been in recent decades that Hollywood has allowed members of historically marginalized groups to tell these stories themselves with any kind of consistency. You see that with increased attention to things like contemporary or historical accounts of marginalized groups of individuals, allowing the larger audience to reckon with the realities of historically marginalized groups.

Wicked (2024)

    But one development that’s been particularly encouraging has been the increased presence of minority performers in fantastical spaces—those where we’re used to seeing being filled by white actors. We discussed a similar phenomenon when we talked about the implications of racebending Ariel. Fantasy has historically been used to obscure the obligations that popular art has to represent humanity in its totality. But Elemental doesn’t do that.

Part of what makes Elemental significant is that not only is this story being told from the perspective of an Asian-American storyteller, an actual child of immigrants, but the two leads are also POC actors. It would have followed a very practiced trajectory to fill the roles of this movie with white actors, but the story knows who it belongs to.

  Now, does all that mean that only children of immigrants or couples in cross-cultural pairings can understand this movie? Well, I’m not presently in either of those situations, but this is one of my favorite Pixar films. Really, this is why we have stories. They put you in a position to consider the experiences of someone with a different history from you. (There’s also quite a bit of discussion here. Members of the dominant culture have the privilege to never “need” to learn about variant experiences where members of an assimilating culture are expected to just get with the program.)

         And that is a huge part of the reason why a film like Elemental becomes a precious document. Because it’s not just that the animators had to pull off a whole bunch of tricks to make the fire people and the water people walk and talk. All the parts of Elemental serve this idea that a “children’s movie” with all its bright colors and elastic characters can be used to bring important stories to the forefront of public imagination.

         And it’s also for that reason that I can’t help but get a little bit peeved at just how blasé critics can be with their criticism of a movie like Elemental.

        One more time, I don’t think that any movie, including a Pixar movie, should be considered beyond criticism. But real criticism aspires to be constructive. (I’m also coming off this fresh from discussing the way that liberal outlets can never make up their mind with what they think Disney’s obligation is to social progress and raising awareness for marginalized issues, and a lot of this movie’s reception can also be understood through that lens as well.) And so when the best a writer can come up with is some variation of “it’s just trying too hard,” I think it’s appropriate to start asking for receipts. 

What Comes Next?

Most criticism of criticism tends to be deflected as simply raging against the standards of the critics in place. The artistic equivalent of admissions into Harvard just getting too competitive. 

But I don’t think for a moment that anyone ought to lower their standards with criticism. I don’t think the problem movies like Elemental face has anything to do with not being able to keep up with critics getting smarter. (I’d actually be more inclined to argue the opposite.)  Rather, I find that a lot of cultural gatekeepers tend to underestimate just how much nostalgia already factors into how they reward movies and how that disadvantages a movie like Elemental.

       If through some wrinkle in the time continuum, we could imagine Elemental and Finding Nemo swapping places, I think we could anticipate that movie receiving a similar response. “Oh sure, the animation of the ocean looks top-dollar, no doubt, but you can just tell it’s trying too hard to be the perfect movie.”

         And I’m not making that up. When critics did try to find fault with Finding Nemo, it was generally something about the movie trying too hard to drive in “the message.” People got over that in part because, yes, Finding Nemo is a fantastic movie, but also because Pixar was still this cool new toy that critics wanted to play with. And after a while, paid journalists just naturally start looking for new talking points.

         And I’m grateful for the landscape that the golden age of Pixar opened the doors for. But if film critics are going to imagine that they are qualified to evaluate the worth of a movie, then that’s what they should be analyzing. Peter Docter recalled seeing some of those initial reviews, saying,

"That was a confusing half-hour there. The film played, we got a seven-minute standing ovation, and you could feel the love beaming down from the audience to [director Peter Sohn]. They really responded to it. Then the embargo lifted and some of the reviews were pretty nasty ...

"This is our 27th film. For some reason, we seem to be critiqued not only based on other movies but on our own stuff. So, people will say, 'Oh, it’s not as good as my favorite Pixar film, whatever that is. On one hand, that’s flattering, and it’s also kind of a tough position to be in and very tricky.”

         I feel that reviews like this think they are sidestepping sentimentality in their analysis. But when a reviewer admits that they can’t articulate a reason why they’re gatekeeping, except that this movie somehow seems too perfect, they’re actually confessing their own deference to nostalgia. They imagine their favorite Pixar movies were perfect, and heaven forbid if gen alpha gets to have good movies too. And this kind of thing absolutely has consequences.

    I was hoping that ELIO would experience a similar bounce back as Elemental, but I guess the box office gods looked down at audiences eating up the "How to Train Your Dragon" remake and just rolled over. It looks like this is the reality Pixar has to face going forward. Hence, watching Elemental kind of feels like watching the last rays of a sunset going behind the mountain. In the wake of Elio’s flop this summer, Doug Creutz wrote,

         “We expect movie studios to react to this clear trend by greenlighting fewer original IP animated films (don’t blame film execs, blame audiences). The issue, of course, is that without new hit properties, a studio cannot grow its IP portfolio. This could be particularly problematic for Disney, which depends on its animated film/parks/consumer products flywheel to help drive overall company growth.”

Jurassic Park (1993)

    Creutz points to film execs and audiences as the two major factors in this equation. I might propose that there is a third. We want audiences to be curious about these things, yes, but they're supposed to navigate this minefield with the help of useful tour guides, people who can confidently determine how novel a film's achievements or even aspirations are. This is what critics are supposed to do, and they're supposed to check their own biases at the door, or at the very least be transparent about them.

    But maybe it's asking too much for critics to honest with others about their limitations because ... I don't think they're being honest with themselves. They don't want to admit that they respond to in a movie like Toy Story, or a movie like WALL-E, is that it made them feel like a kid again. They don't want to confront that, yes, this kind of thing has a place even in the well-adjusted adult mind. And they certainly don't want to imagine that such an effect could be reproduced in this ecosystem from the largest corporation in entertainment. (No really, fellas. You can like Frozen II as well as I'm Still Here. You can do both.)

Did y'all really have to be so mean to
Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 (2024)?

    Pixar Animation and its specific place in the culture of film critics makes it a very interesting subject in this conversation. But I also think that there's a lot to be said for the way that film criticism, especially in the age of social media, generally defers to preserving a certain image of itself rather than fulfilling its task--appearing discerning becomes more important than exploring the nuances and possibilities of a medium that even a century later is seeking to add texture to its own definition. And I can't help but feel like the movies that are the most likely to be punished for this are the movies that are actually in the best position to save cinema.

    Movies like ELIO and Elemental have basically persisted in defiance of the expectations of the market. Where both audiences and studios have tried to herd animation onto iPads, these movies have opted for deep emotions carried by dazzling spectacle that is tailored for cinematic display. That's exactly how we'd hope they'd behave in this situation. But we absolutely cannot expect them to persist if critics continue in this charade.

         So what comes next for Pixar?

Gatto, due 2027

    Well, Toy Story 5 is going to make bank. Maybe a billion, maybe not. Critics will muse on how pleasantly surprised they were by it, and then never talk about it again. Same with COCO 2.

         With Hoppers and Gatto on the horizon, though, there are opportunities to help redirect the current. Audiences have opportunities to consider what it is they really want from our chief storytellers. But before that'll ever happen, critics will have to reckon with their feelings about where inspiration or revelation can come from. Commenting on filmmakers’ obligations to create original art, Pete Docter said, 

"Right now, the world seems to want the comfort of what they know, which is sequels, and movies based on things like comic books or video games. But all of these things were original at one point. I think it’s essential for us to develop new original stories, which are harder to publicize, harder to get people excited to go see them. But I think audiences deserve it …

"Our philosophy from the beginning has been the same. The people have changed, but the approach is the same. We tap people that we believe in and feel like they have talent and something to say. We ask them to talk about things that are important to them. If this is impactful and powerful to a person, they’re going to get on the screen, and it will resonate with audiences. We’re looking to tap these amazingly talented people I get to work with to talk about universal stories that are about life issues that we all face. Our movies on the surface are about fish, cars and monsters, but just below that, they’re really about all of us, and the challenge of dealing with loss, becoming a parent, finding our place in the world."

          Film studios, they are not very practiced in good judgment, but a part of me is still able to imagine that Pixar will get to persevere, that they will scout out those thin margins where art and passion are allowed to grow in between commerce and bottom lines. But that’s not something that should fall on filmmakers alone.

                --The Professor