(courtesy IMP Awards)
We are paradoxical creatures when it comes to watched entertainment.
We want to both escape into places so wildly different and vibrantly escapist that the humdrum of the day-to-day world fades to the lingering whispers of a dull roar but we want to find something in all this gloriously realised difference with which we can identify, something that gives us an “in” into somewhere that, by any estimation, is very out there.
That’s not always something that is handed to us by every film or TV show maker but in the case of Pixar’s latest gem, Elemental, it is delivered in emotionally resonant, technicolour spades in a film that presents us with a world that is wholly removed from anything we know (though the cityscape evokes Zootopia‘s, it is still very much richly its own original thing) but so rich in the feelings and circumstances that make us human, for better or worse, that it feels intimately familiar in amongst all the beautiful strangeness.
Simultaneously a romantic comedy and a touching exploration of the immigrant story, Elemental is set in the toweringly colourful surrounds of Element City, a place where people made of earth, water, air and fire exist in neighbourhoods both separate and overlapping and where the full beguiling extent of their luminously lovely world is on full frenetic display.
Somehow in the middle of this cacophony of people and hope, two very different people – earnest, eager-to-please Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis) who is the daughter of working class immigrants who faced down xenophobia and exclusion to establish a thriving business known as the Fireplace, and garrulously friendly and deeply emotional rich boy Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie) – meet and as is the way of many a rom-com where opposites unwillingly attract (to be fair any unwillingness is more Ember’s than Wade’s) and eventually fall in love.
But while the meet-cute to fulfillment is an effervescent rollercoaster of romantic joy, life isn’t entirely straightforward for the two young, quite divergent lovers.
In the world crafted by Peter Sohn (who gave us the vastly under-appreciated The Good Dinosaur), himself a child of Korean immigrants to New York City, Ember and Wade occupy two dizzyingly different sides of the societal divide.
While earth, air and water mix with consummate ease, and Wade enjoy’s life with a supportive and warmly enveloping family high atop a concierge-served apartment tower, Ember has grown up in a fire-only enclave where her element has been ghettoised by residents of a city that fear what fire could be rather than taking the time to learn about all the beautifully uplifting qualities of a richly vivacious and community-oriented culture.
The two would-be lovebirds have grown up occupying completely different places in Element City, both physical and attitudinal and while there is attraction there, acting on it is far easier for a person of privilege like Wade than it is for Ember who is bound to the fortunes of her family in more ways than one.
Her family are avowedly loving and caring with her dad Bernie and mum Cinder (Ronnie del Carmen and Shila Ommi respectively) as devoted a set of parents as you could ask for, but Bernie strongly expects Ember to take over their shop and to sustain the fruits of their immigrant dream and until she meets Wade, and realise how much she wants from life that is not tied to her mum and dad’s dreams, that’s what Ember wants too.
So caught between devotion to family, and Ember loves and respects her family fiercely, dare we say it with a fiery passion, the two do not have an easy road to love or personal fulfillment.
If that sounds a huge amount of emotional subtext going on, that’s because Elemental, one of the finest films Pixar has crafted and more than justified in being placed alongside films like Toy Story, UP and Inside Out to name just three, is not just a rapturously good, visually striking film though it most certainly is with fire and water, notoriously hard to animate, made the mesmerising stars of a heart-tugging show.
It earns its place high up on the table of resonantly executed Pixar films because it combines an extraordinarily well-realised world that springs off the screen with stunningly evocative colours and settings with so much affecting, authentically told humanity that you can’t help but feel all the things.
ALL OF THEM.
If you have had to bridge any kind of great divide in your life, whether it’s been your parents’ immigrant dreams and your own developed in a society of which you are a part, and yet sometimes not, or moving between the orthodoxy you grew up and the truth of who you are and want to be, you will find much in the often-times hard-hitting storytelling of Elemental with which to identify.
People may casually refer with a heart-filled sigh and not a little jocularity (the better to diffuse the intensity of the emotion) to “all the feels” but the truth is that Elemental does contain a multitude of stories and emotions, becoming far more than just a rom-com (though it does that superbly well) or a powerful story of immigration and prejudice and eventual success against the odds (though here too it is movingly exemplary) and infusing its avowedly wonderful entertaining qualities with such a depth of emotion and humanity that it more than matches the gloriously good, world-building splendour of its animation.
This is a film that knows that while worlds can be promising and possibilities can be beguilingly endless, the payoff does not come easily or at all, and there are quite a few times in Elemental when the hoped-for happy ending seems as far off and elusive as a way of stopping the canal water that may or may not spell eventual doom for Firetown.
We have long loved Pixar for its ability to dazzle us with imagery and speak to our hearts with truth and understanding of the human condition but in Elemental it has taken things up yet another notch, offering escapist storytelling for sure but filling with so much wonder and hope, sadness and disappointment, love and connection that you can’t help but feel your heart is every bit as engaged as your eyes and that you will be forever changed by the experience.
And now for some soundtrack goodness …