My Review of "Elemental"

Elemental is Pixar's summer movie of 2023. It didn't do the greatest and I was wondering why. Usually Pixar has a great track record and even when their movies aren't that great there's some redeeming quality about them. With Disney's push to streaming on their new Disney plus platform I can kind of see why families are opting to wait for their movies to stream at home.

This movie starts out with the introduction of our main protagonist Ember and her family. They're an immigrant family moving to a place that fears them. Being a family friendly movie they opted to make these characters based on basic elements of Earth. Ember and her family are made of fire.

In this world there are also other elements such as water, wind and earth. Of course a lot of the other elements will naturally fear fire for obvious reasons. I get what they're trying to do, make a metaphor for cultural differences within our reality. The big difference is that there are real natural reasons why water, fire, wind and trees should fear each other.

Going back to the fire element. Ember and her family really had to struggle in order to make it into this new city. There are a lot of struggles that they had to go through that the other elements didn't consider and still don't consider. After years of hard work Ember's father had grown the fire community in their neighborhood and has created a successful cafe. He hopes to hand it off to Ember eventually.

Ember does what she can to become a great daughter for their family but struggles with her own internal problems. This is where her violent rages set off. These violent rages get her into lots of trouble and she has trouble expressing her emotions and thoughts. In this movie Ember has to discover who she really is and find out how to pursue her true self.

I have to admit that I didn't like Ember's character in the beginning. In fact, I don't like her character at all but after a while I did understand where she's coming from. Some of the annoyances of her character kind of get explained later on but they're still not forgivable.

It's really weird because usually Pixar does a good job in the beginning of their movies to explain who the character is and what their motivations are before moving forward. In this movie they tell us her family's history and then move on with the movie. Knowing someone's family history does not tell me anything about a character's personality or character. This movie felt like it was stuck on identity rather than focusing on the character development of our main protagonist.

I guess that would be fine in other movies dealing with more complex issues but this is supposed to be a family film. I don't really expect to go into these types of realms. It's nice as a side story but not as the main focus of the movie. I felt that this took away from a lot of the fun this movie could have been.

There are tons of potential with this story. They have all the right "elements" in there but I felt that it was executed in the wrong way. It could have had a few more drafts to figure itself out. Though the visuals of this movie were really impressive. Some of the stuff that they can do now with CGI is truly incredible. It was a little weird seeing such realistic graphics alongside such cartoonish characters though.

Overall, I thought this movie was an okay time. It's passable but not quite recommendation worthy. Visually you will get stunned by this movie at times though. I won't knock you for wanting to see this one just for a tech demo. As a movie for entertainment wise I have to give this movie a 6 out of 10. Stick with it through the annoying first part of the movie and it does get better.