Elemental

2020 was a memorable year for many reasons, but the quality of movies was not one of them. The pandemic obviously crippled the entire filmgoing industry to different degrees, but Pixar Animation Studios endured better than most. The studio gave us arguably the two best films released during the calendar year, with Onward unfortunately opening right before theaters closed and Soul emerging as a streaming debut as unifying as anything when it premiered on Disney+ on Christmas Day. Pixar’s creative success was nothing out of the ordinary; by then, the Emeryville, California studio had been consistently producing first-rate, all-audiences cinema for a quarter-century.

Now, it increasingly looks like that was the end of Pixar’s golden age, a last gasp of genius culminating twenty-five years of unprecedented technical and artistic ingenuity. Nothing that the studio has put out in the three years since has approached the same towering heights. The one film given worldwide theatrical release — last summer’s Lightyear — set an all-time low at the box office (excluding Onward‘s asterisk-blip of an essentially seven-day run). And this summer’s tentpole, Elemental, seems poised to underperform as well.

It was inevitable that the studio would eventually miss their marks after hitting them year in and year out. No studio or individual has ever sustained greatness indefinitely. Legendary athletes retire. Universally beloved world leaders reach the end of their terms. And any entity in the filmmaking business successful enough to become an insitution onto itself will eventually lose its way and hope to find it again. Still, it’s thoroughly heartbreaking to see just how quickly Pixar has ceased to be the gold standard in American animation.

I’ll return to what might sound like an overdramatic or premature lament of Pixar, but first let’s look at Elemental, a film I cannot hesitate to place at the shallow end of the studio’s now 27-film-deep canon.

Elemental is helmed by Peter Sohn, a story artist at Pixar for over twenty years going back to Finding Nemo whose prior directing credits include the 2009 Up-preceding short Partly Cloudy and the troubled 2015 misfire The Good Dinosaur. It is set in a world where people are anthropomorphic versions of nature’s four elements. Society is divided into fire, water, earth, and air and if you think that’s the blueprint for some heavy-handed allegory about any kind of identity (but mostly, ethnic or racial), you’re absolutely right.

Our primary focus is Ember Lumen (voiced by Leah Lewis), the nearly grown-up daughter of a couple of fire immigrants who own a sort of general store in Fire Town. Ember’s hardworking dad (voiced by veteran Pixar story artist and Inside Out co-writer Ronnie del Carmen, channeling Tony Shalhoub) anticipates the day when he’ll retire and hand the reins of the shop over to the spirited but short-tempered Ember. That long-term plan becomes jeopardized when the store gets an unexpected visit from Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie), an inspector for Element City who writes up the establishment for a host of major code violations.

The store is now to be shuttered in one week, which gives Ember just a little bit of time to try to plead her case, something she does with help from nervous newbie Wade and some of his supervisors. Meanwhile, in the course of spending time together, Wade and Ember fall for one another, which is a preposterous and seemingly unheard-of notion in this universe.

Elemental gives us much of the weakest writing to ever bear the Pixar name. The completely out of left field Cars 2, the weirdly patched-together Good Dinosaur, and last year’s head-scratching legacy fumble Lightyear all hold more glimmers of wit and wisdom than the treacle we get here from Sohn and the three much less seasoned screenwriters he shares story credit with. The high concept universe feels like one that Pete Docter (Inside Out, Soul, Monsters, Inc.) might have come up with but rejected because it just doesn’t really hold up to any scrutiny or logic. Sohn and his fellow scribes are aiming for Zootopia-type progressive social commentary and instead end up on the level of 2000s DreamWorks outings like Shark Tale and Bee Movie. There are lots of verbal and visual puns that fall flat. Radiator Springs’ automotive equivalents of our ecosphere seems downright sophisticated and ingenious compared to the parade of witless gags dreamed up here.

Even the technical side of things — one domain in which we’ve always been able to count on Pixar excelling — leaves much to be desired. Effects animation has advanced considerably since the day when Woody needed Buzz’s helmet to light “The Big One” and the crew here does plenty of impressive things with fire and water. But the character design is pretty unappealing. The air beings can be traced back to Partly Cloudy, which I now expect to remain Sohn’s best work ever. The off-putting fire characters opt for a traditional hand-drawn, Miyazakian look which does not at all blend seamlessly with their three-dimensional flames. The weepy water characters have a different but equally uncomfortable fusion of cartoons and science, with their detailed, reflective translucence. And the earth characters are a complete throwaway class, consisting of a boy sprouting weeds in his armpits and a soft-spoken pencil-pusher voiced by the endearing Joe Pera.

With a $200 million budget and a workforce as big as any animation house, the team behind Elemental overdesigns Element City, a dizzying metropolis you never admire or are even given a chance to. The very, uh, nature of this concept lends to unpleasant compositions: a crowded store full of flickering fire, an urban apartment with water everywhere. If nothing else, I was certain that Elemental would wow us visually, but I found it much too busy and lacking in cohesion. In the pantheon of Pixar, only The Good Dinosaur rivals this in terms of limited aesthetic appeal. In fairness, most of the other major American animation studios rarely warrant any kind of technical acknowledgement. Still, just a couple of weeks removed from Across the Spider-Verse, the narrowing gap in visual artistry that used to exist between Pixar and the competition seems to now reside and expand above Pixar’s head.

Pixar’s history of excellence urges us to judge them harshly, so I will point out the few things I did not dislike here. After all, though bottom rung by the studio’s standards, this is a mediocre piece of entertainment judged against cinema at large. In addition to the aforementioned Pera, whose lines can be counted on one hand, the unusually low-wattage voice cast features as Wade’s mother the lovably wacky Catherine O’Hara (“Schitt’s Creek”, Home Alone), who surprisingly has never before turned up on a Pixar call sheet despite a long history of voiceover (and live-action) comedy. There’s a stadium scene involving a playoff “airball” game which kind of recalls the casual, contemporary vibe of Monsters University (with a dash of Quidditch) and utilizes the still-banging “Kernkraft 400” by Zombie Nation. And there are some commendable values ingrained in the storytelling, which should be obvious and universal but might still need to be heard by the old-fashioned, hard-headed, and prejudiced demographics (all of whom Disney has been deliberately alienating for years). Plus, it bears mentioning, particularly at the height of Hollywood’s sequel and remake season, the effort involved in original storytelling is always appreciated, even when it falls short.

Now, getting back to the troubling present state of Pixar, which feels less like a slump and more like…an ice age. The most obvious explanation is that the Pixar of today is not the Pixar of the ’90s, 2000s, and 2010s. Co-founder Ed Catmull retired in 2019. The late Steve Jobs, Pixar’s CEO until Disney acquired the studio in 2006, obviously is no longer with us. And, probably most significantly, John Lasseter, the longtime creative heart of the company and director of their earliest films, has been gone since 2018 after an investigation into managerial misconduct.

Docter, director of some of Pixar’s brightest masterpieces, now serves as the studio’s chief creative officer, a role that has pulled him away from filmmaking itself and for which he now does not seem particularly well-suited. Brad Bird, the maker of The Incredibles and Ratatouille, left Pixar to join Lasseter at the upstart Skydance Animation (which is also now apparently the only place to hear longtime Pixar good luck charm John Ratzenberger, whose 22-movie voice acting streak ended unceremoniously on Soul). Lee Unkrich, director of 2010s triumphs Toy Story 3 and Coco, left to spend more time with his family and write a book about his favorite movie, The Shining. Like Unkrich, Andrew Stanton, the company’s most frequent scribe and the director of WALL-E and Finding Nemo, is still credited as part of the 32-member Pixar Senior Creative Team, although his interest appears to now lie in making live-action movies, which he first did with the 2012 flop John Carter and is currently doing again for Searchlight Pictures.

Obviously, no studio, not even one with a near-flawless track record, can expect key personnel to remain there indefinitely. The problem is not just the departures, diminished duties, and divergent paths of all these extremely talented people responsible for some of the most beloved films of the past three decades. The problem is that the new talent joining the fray seem to have somehow grown up in an alternate universe where Pixar was not the only one giving us a new mind-blowing masterpiece every summer. Disney and Pixar have been great about having diverse artists fill major creative roles, but if the results are middling movies like Elemental, Lightyear, and Turning Red, then something is fundamentally wrong within the organization’s processes. It seems unfathomable that someone bright enough to get hired at Pixar could be happy with the mediocre work found within.

Amidst the uninspired puns, prejudiced rants in broken English, painful romcom-type montage, and mildly cringey original song by LAUV, one line of dialogue in Elemental stood out enough for me to want to try to write it down in the dark (something I never do and, ultimately, did not). Ember and her family live their life by the “Firish” word “tìshók”, meaning “Embrace the light while it burns because it won’t always last forever.” I could not possibly have appreciated Pixar’s decades of brilliance any more than I have, but that does not make it any easier to accept the disappointments of this banality.

Elemental is preceded by Carl’s Date, an original 10-minute short film originally intended to be the sixth and final episode of the Disney+ series “Dug Days.” In it, the cranky old widower from Up, Carl Fredricksen (still voiced by the late Ed Asner, a bit unrecognizably in one of his last jobs) works himself up for his first date in forever, talking it over with his speech collar-equipped adopted dog Dug (Bob Peterson), buying chocolates, and even dying his hair black. If this is the end of the world from Up, and it would appear to be, what a depressing send-off it is. And yet, it’s still slightly better than the new movie that follows.