Feature Movie Review: Elemental 

• Disney Pixar

For most of its nearly-30-year history of making animated feature films, Pixar has reliably taken a two-pronged approach to their construction: Let's call it The Hook and The Heart. The Hook refers to the marketing-friendly high concept that provides the universe for the story, one that could generally be summarized as "what if [fill-in-the-blank] were just like people," with that blank being filled in over the years by toys, bugs, cars, emotions, merfolk, souls, etc. And The Heart refers to the thematic ideas for which The Hook becomes a clever delivery system—about family relationships, growing up, facing change, and so forth. At their best, the Pixar films have found a perfect pairing of form and content, creating fun, visually-rich worlds that allowed the emotional material to sneak up on you.

Elemental fits squarely into that successful Pixar template, beginning with "what if the four ancient elements of fire, water, earth and air were just like people," and using that as a launching pad for a narrative addressing the second-generation immigrant experience. But as gifted as the animators remain at creating their worlds, there's something that feels unfinished and clunky about Elemental's storytelling. The earnest desire to explore an idea with some cultural specificity gets lost in half-finished ideas and overly-familiar animation tropes.

The story opens with the arrival in Element City of the Lumens: Bernie (Ronnie Del Carmen) and his pregnant wife Cinder (Shila Ommi), among the first Fire People to arrive in the land already inhabited by the Earth, Water and Air People. Years later, they've created a successful store in a thriving Fire People sub-community, with their young daughter Ember (Leah Lewis) in line to inherit the family business. Then the arrival of Wade Ripple (Mamadou Athie), a Water Person building inspector, threatens the possibility that the Lumens' store might be shut down, sending Ember on a mission to save it, out into the world beyond the one she's known her whole life.

That world is, not surprisingly, full of wonderful detail, and it's the place where Elemental proves most consistently successful. Though there are noticeable echoes of Zootopia in the bustling, colorful metropolis with its segregated society, director Peter Sohn and his creative team carve out a unique sensibility with the design of their physical spaces. And technically, they do remarkable things with the juxtaposition of materials, most notably the reflection of flame in surfaces like glass and water. As an experience to look at, Elemental almost always impresses, having plenty of fun with jokes like Water People spectators at a sporting event starting a quite-literal "wave."

As an experience to think about, though? Less so. It's not so much that Elemental feels more than slightly reminiscent of Pixar's recent Turning Red in its focus on a girl struggling against the culturally-specific expectations of her immigrant family; it took a long time for feature animation to branch out into more diverse experiences, and there are many shades to play within that framework. It's more that the creative team keeps dipping a toe into related topics without really being willing to explore them in depth: providing only token references to the kind of bigotry that might lead immigrants to remain in comfortable enclaves; alluding to microaggressions, yet using the notion as a punch line; suggesting an evolution and strengthening of society that comes from folding in the experience of other cultures, then letting that concept disappear like an unfired Chekhovian gun. Too many set-ups in Elemental just don't pay off, even when the opportunity to do so is just sitting there.

There's plenty of frustration as well in the elements-cross'd romance between Ember and Wade, which feels stated more than earned. That's no fault of the voice performances, as Lewis and Athie both do terrific work—the former at capturing a free-floating and undefined frustration with her circumstances, the latter at making Wade's emotionalism engaging rather than over-the-top as a manifestation of cultural differences in expressing feelings openly. Elemental has the potential to cover a lot of thematic ground, but it keeps doing an incomplete job of delivering the knockout punch for every idea it introduces. After all this time, Pixar still knows how to craft The Hook. This time around, unfortunately, while its heart is in the right place, The Heart too rarely is.