![]() ![]() In part, it’s the story of an immigrant family - a fire family, to be specific, the Lumens, who move to the big city in search of a better life for their fire child Ember (Leah Lewis). I am a little disappointed, though, by the feeling that Elemental is underdeveloped, both by Pixar story standards and the standards of much less exacting movies. ![]() No need to drag the Presocratics in to please me. For director Peter Sohn, the four elements are really just a way to construct a little imaginative universe in which to play, and I mean, I can’t fault him. ![]() To the ancients, the elements were a way to explain all of existence by way of four fundamentals, simple substances that would make the complexity of the natural world more legible. You may be expecting (and I half-expected to be writing) some soliloquy on Plato and Hippocrates and whatever here, but Elemental doesn’t give us that. For a giant nerd (me), a movie starring the ancient four elements - earth, air, fire, and water - sounded weird and gutsy and great, so hopes ran high. Soul is Pixar’s most visually inventive film, and one of its most poignant.Īnyhow, this all brings us to Elemental. ( Soul and Luca also went straight to streaming, but at the height of the pandemic, with other concerns at heart.) Honestly, that’s fine - everyone gets some swings and misses - but Disney for some reason decided to push Pixar’s best recent offering, Turning Red, straight to Disney+ with no theatrical option, probably in a now-cooling enthusiasm about streaming. In 2006, Disney acquired Pixar, and alongside other unfortunate factors, the “can’t-miss” reputation has slowly declined, with relative duds like The Good Dinosaur, the less-than-loved Cars series (at least among the parents of their target audience), and Lightyear (want to feel old? Lightyear came out less than a year ago) tarnishing the shine. Wall-E narrowly missed my Sight & Sound ballot last year. ( Toy Story was released in 1995, shortly after my 12th birthday, but I wasn’t too grown up to love it when my grandma took me to see it.) A new Pixar movie used to be enough of an event in my life that my husband and I, full-grown adults, felt perfectly comfortable showing up to see Ratatouille unaccompanied by children. Not to sound like an old person, but I do miss the Pixar of my youth - the can’t-miss studio that turned out artful, funny movies for kids and adults and had cultural staying power. ![]()
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