Is “Elemental” Pixar’s Most Chaotic Chapter Yet?
By Argoon
It seems the most chaotic aspect of “Elemental” is its box office performance. With a North American opening weekend grossing less than $30 million, it marks Pixar’s worst debut in 28 years, since the studio’s groundbreaking “Toy Story.”
However, it’s clear that Pixar is relying on this film to revitalize its brand. It received a wide theatrical release and, internationally, revived the tradition of pre-feature shorts, a practice that had been dormant for five years since “Incredibles 2.” “Carl’s Date,” a spin-off short from “Up,” led the way.
Given this box office reception, it’s worth revisiting Pixar’s six releases since 2020. Only three of these, despite mixed reviews, had budgets as high as $200 million. “Lightyear” ultimately flopped, barely surpassing its budget, while “Onward,” relegated to streaming, signaled the first financial loss of the pandemic era. Now, “Elemental” seems to be heading down a similar path as “Lightyear.”
Perhaps even Pixar didn’t anticipate that “Soul” and “Turning Red,” with budgets of $150 million, would be the films to restore their reputation. Meanwhile, “Luca,” with only half the budget of “Elemental,” became a dark horse, achieving the highest box office returns.
This box office failure isn’t just a matter of bad luck. It reflects Pixar’s decline in recent years, with fewer critically acclaimed films, leading to an undeniable association with “decline.”
From a personal perspective, as a Pixar enthusiast, I still find enjoyment in this film. The visually stunning presentation still offers novelty, humor, heartfelt emotions, and genuine hope.
However, the lowered standards across various aspects suggest a growing sense of fatigue and even insecurity. Ultimately, it’s easy to conclude that “Elemental” is another film that would be considered above average on its own, but easily overshadowed when compared to other works.
Pixar’s Diminished Dominance
Pixar is no longer the undisputed leader, not just in the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature category, where it has occasionally been defeated by DreamWorks (“Shrek”), Warner Bros./Village Roadshow (“Happy Feet”), Columbia/Sony (“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”), and Netflix (“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”).
More importantly, while it remains a prestigious brand representing the pinnacle of animation technology, it’s no longer universally successful in terms of story innovation and emotional resonance.
There was a time when everything was “Pixar-able,” which was incredibly exciting. Toys and cars could be fully anthropomorphized, with emotions evolving into distinct personalities, marking another astonishing creative leap for Pixar. Following this logic, humanizing the four elements should have been a natural progression.
However, it’s hard to ignore that the game “Fireboy and Watergirl” already featured gender-swapped fire and water characters. “Elemental” had to carefully navigate around the pre-existing similarities, using intricate techniques to carve out its own unique vision from the limited creative space.
Moreover, unlike “Inside Out,” which achieved profound simplicity within a complex story, allowing emotions deeply connected to human memory to be elevated through sophisticated storytelling, “Elemental” ultimately feels like a waste of potential.
“Elemental” vs. “Zootopia”: A Matter of Scale
When compared to Disney’s “Zootopia,” a high-achieving film with a similar naming convention, the impact on “Elemental” is even more pronounced.
Both films deal with the integration of diverse groups. However, “Zootopia” features a complex representation of almost the entire ecosystem, excluding insects and fish. The city itself is meticulously planned and designed, with diverse styles in the surrounding towns, creating a stunningly rich, fresh, and vast symbiotic landscape, filled with countless, carefully considered details from the grand scale to the minute.
In contrast, Element City reduces the diversity to just four elements: wind, fire, water, and earth. The differences within each element are not fully explored, and the geographical differentiation lacks sufficient and necessary detail, resulting in a relatively simple, even monotonous, world compared to its predecessor.
“Elemental” attempts to focus on the superpowers of the male and female leads, based on their fire and water natures, supplemented by limited displays from the other two elements, to showcase creative insights. In this regard, Ember, in particular, achieves visually stunning representations of her abilities. However, in the realm of superpower and magic stories, “The Incredibles” and Disney’s “Frozen” series are formidable competitors.
This highlights another area where “Elemental” falls short: the lack of adventure. There’s no villain, no conspiracy, just a false alarm that makes the audience believe a leak will lead to a major event. This can hardly be called “innovation” in narrative, but rather an avoidance of clichés.
Aside from the limited scope, this plot setup inadvertently places the “villain” label on Ember’s father, Bernie.
While it challenges intangible concepts like Asian traditions and patriarchy, the film picks up these weighty themes only to dismiss them lightly, easily undermining the paternal image it simultaneously tries to establish, creating a contradiction that extends to the film’s core message.
A Familiar Love Story
Let’s take a detour to examine this further.
From a vast array of options, “Elemental” entrusts its main storyline to love, specifically the traditional kind, where two people in love face disapproval and obstruction from their families.
Interestingly, love, a theme Disney has overused for a century, is given center stage for the first time in Pixar’s twenty-seven films. The closest parallel is “WALL-E,” but it clearly has a grander purpose to challenge.
As love prominently arrives in Element City, a classic love story, or rather a fairytale love story, unfolds smoothly. Two people start as bickering rivals, see the best in each other, grow closer amidst obstacles, and then separate due to those obstacles, until they overcome the greatest difficulty and happily come together.
Pixar’s first foray into love is formulaic, but still enjoyable, especially when Wade takes Ember underwater to see the flowers, and they break the stereotype of fire and water being incompatible, holding hands and embracing. The escalation of their romantic relationship is quite charming.
However, there are issues. When it’s too formulaic, it’s easy to predict the development and question the necessity or even the rationality of some plot points. For example, when Ember is about to take over the shop, Wade reminds her to respect her inner choices in a not-so-subtle way, and she publicly rejects him with harsh words, somewhat stifling the possibility of love. The subsequent development feels disjointed and impure.
The bigger question is, what does this love story aim to challenge?
The female character wants to face her inner self, such as not inheriting the family business and pursuing her artistic talents by studying away from home. However, her voice needs the encouragement of a male character, just as the mother’s power in the family is no greater than, or even equal to, the authoritarian father.
The less affluent class, with their limited vision in the marginalized territory, points to a narrow scope, like the less favored Fire element, holding a position akin to barbarians.
Ember’s artistic talent needs to be discovered, encouraged, and connected by Wade’s mother, a representative of the local middle class, and that only requires a glance, a phone call, which in turn highlights Bernie’s concern, in the name of love, as blind and arrogant, with a self-gratifying inheritance.
So, is it challenging these inequalities based on gender, class, and so on? It seems so, but in the positive and lukewarm narrative tone, these are not highlighted and can only become symbolic collisions in interpretation.
The Father as the “Villain”
On this basis, Bernie’s role as the “villain” becomes somewhat intriguing.
First, he is a very typical father figure, generous, kind, and the pillar of the family. More than a purely Asian father, he expresses love. Overall, he is a very positive figure in the early stages.
However, in the absence of sharp ethnic hatred between the Fire and Water elements, his uniform resentment towards the Water people and his hasty disappointment in his daughter lack sufficient foreshadowing and require greater actions than the discriminatory obstruction of the past.
In this case, the audience, especially those with Asian backgrounds, will be led back to their own upbringing, questioning whether their parents’ all-out hope and love are a huge burden, whether they are afraid of disappointing their parents, whether they are accustomed to endlessly compromising themselves to meet expectations, and whether they have turned this compromise into an instinct to fulfill filial piety… An entire Asian, especially East Asian, logic emerges as a nightmarish horror.
After that strong sense of identification, Ember, or we, need to confront the “villain,” or even more harshly, commit spiritual patricide, breaking the components of patriarchy and authority, and separating from such constraints and oppression.
The subtle part of fairy tales is that they allow these parental figures to quickly transform at critical moments, reborn in a new, perfect image.
What is critical? It’s the emergence of events that are more shocking to so-called values, or even greater tragedies, like the possibility of the daughter’s death, and Wade’s apparent “death.” Before life and death, even misplaced love is no longer so important.
These scenes can be tearful, but it’s hard to be happily convinced. It’s not a typical villain that the protagonist defeats, creating a sense of exhilarating excitement. Here, it only uncovers scars and makes the pain of the scars particularly felt, even unbearable.
However, this is not a new creation. It actually connects with the threads of Asian stories over the years, especially Asian relationships placed in a Western perspective, and the self-identification of Asians in foreign integration, concerning how people from different camps view each other, and how people in different relationships digest it.
From Disney and Pixar to the entire Hollywood, Asian stories in recent years have always been making a fuss in this format.
For example, this film was inspired by the real experiences of director Peter Sohn, who immigrated to the United States from Korea with his parents, unable to speak the language, and had to settle in the high-crime Bronx in New York. Later, they opened a grocery store called “Sohn’s Fruits and Vegetables.”
As for “Mulan,” “Raya and the Last Dragon,” and “Turning Red,” they are all such family models. Further out, “The Farewell,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” “American Born Chinese,” and other Asian-background stories always have related performances. The reconciliation of the two generations is certainly moving, but after collective writing, it will inevitably lead to some trance when looking at reality.
Looking at non-Asian stories, Disney and Pixar have indeed been constantly expanding geographically over the years, but whenever it comes to family, such as “Coco,” “Encanto,” and even the early “The Little Mermaid,” the path of “the protagonist catering to the previous generation” turning into “the previous generation affirming the protagonist” is still the same. At this time, the particularity of Asia itself is also easily diluted.
When Disney has been gaining freshness in recent years by giving up certain aspects of love, the team that created the high-scoring animations “Coco” and “Soul,” after discussing the soul and life and death, in the current context where it is more difficult to “mind one’s own business,” falls back to such a vision, and it is not surprising that it is considered not enjoyable enough.