Channelknight Fadran

Oh also I watched Elemental today.

I did that last Pixar rankings recently enough that it's still on my profile's Activity tab for all to see, so it's not like I'm going to redo the whole thing again to place this one in there. But with that said, I regret to inform you that very little has changed in the standings with the addition of this film.

First of all: Context.

I remember hearing from absolutely everyone and absolutely everywhere that Elemental was "going to be such a bad movie" before we even got a full feature trailer, which is like... what? I'm all for gauging how much you might enjoy a movie by watching the trailer, and setting your expectations accordingly - there have been many, many, many cases in which I've correctly predicted the turnout of various movie rankings based on their trailers, because well... it honestly isn't that hard. A lot of people can do it, and I honestly have no problem with them deciding that something's bad before they see it based on the trailers.

What bothered me was that people were starting to throw needless accusations and condemnations about long before the film itself released, and furthermore giving entire long-winded explanations of how awful it was as if they had somehow already seen it - "Just another Pixar film," "The studio's really gone downhill,' "It's an all-time low;" we had just gotten the teaser, guys. Chill.

That said,

the movie sucks

So it came out on Disney+ today, which meant I pretty much had no excuse not to watch it. Awhile back my little sister wanted to go see it in theaters with me, but that ultimately didn't happen - mostly because I'd heard some pretty negative reviews and figured it really wasn't going to deserve my full, undivided attention. If that old dollar theater was still in business here I prolly would've gone and seen it there, but to see a new movie in The Cinema implies a level of predetermined respect for the product in the first place - stuff like the MCU (before it started going downhill), Star Wars (before it started going downhill), and also  D u n e  (which is great and you should watch it).

But you know... I haven't been doing much with my life lately. Every day is kind of just the same monotonous nothing that I always do, so when my sister asks if I want to watch Elemental with her, I'm like "Sure." Worst-case scenario it's a bad movie and I'm on my phone the whole time. I log out of Minecraft, grab my sketchbook (which is basically my anti-phone distraction device), and plop down on the couch to see if it's any good.

I set my expectations to "low" in advance, which is a technique I highly recommend if you want to just have a good time watching a movie. I wasn't expecting much out of Turning Red or Lightyear, and so I found myself pleasantly surprised as they turned out to be quite enjoyable - and those are both movies that people also continuously riffed on for being "bad," so I figured that even if Elemental wasn't good, I could still find a level of enjoyment in it.

It opens to bad animation, which is... you know? That's fine. Honestly, I think I'd prefer these early-2000s fire effects to something more "realistic" that a studio could concoct. It was still pretty distracting at times, and definitely notable in the first few scenes, even though it was really only the fire people who looked bad while everything else was... if not good, then at least "fine."

There's a checkpoint scene followed by a bunch of racism, which was my first (and pretty much only necessary) clue to the fact that this movie was presumably built on the idea of the difficulty of immigration. and continued exposition throughout the film narrowed it down to Asian-American parallels; which was actually handled quite well, if a little blatantly. The movie was directed by Peter Sohn, whose parents immigrated from Korea to the USA, raising him in New York.

A hopskip and a montage later, we've got a completely new setting and - lo and behold - the protagonist. And while the somewhat obviously-paced and directed opening sequence had already clued me in that my expectatoins were not unfounded, this next bit was perhaps the most damning of the movie's ultimate fate. All the childhood bonding scenes between Ember and her dad in the first few minutes were so cliche that I could tell in advance "aha, this is a movie with daddy issues," and also so emotionally barren that I could also tell in advance "aha, this movie does not handle said daddy issues with much finesse."

I probably shouldn't go into all the scenes in detail or anything, because that would imply a level of vitriol I actually have for the movie, which I don't. I wasn't cringing or sighing or otherwise despising the film as I "watched" it (read: drew a cool wizard lady while occasionally glancing up), because I was too busy being inexplicably bored.

There are two main problems that the movie faced: Pacing and Theme.

The first is a difficult one to analyze, because lots of different movies have lots of different methods to Pace their stories, that all work in various scenarios. Pacing, ultimately, is something you can just sort of tell to be good or bad, and even if you can pin a good reason to it, doesn't mean you found an example of "how not to do Pacing."

That said, the Pacing issues in this movie were glaringly clear. It started pretty okay with the character introductions - which were actually quite solid in and of themselves - but scenes started churning together at such an uneven pace with remarkable inefficiency as soon as the first major Conflict bit came up.

I don't know what age the main characters are supposed to be in the movie, but a safe guess could put them in their early twenties - and I don't know how many of y'all know this, but adult romance is weird. In High School there's all this buildup and tension over weeks or months or even years before someone actually asks their crush out on a date; for adults? If you hang out with a person for a few days, you can ask them out and they'll probably be fine with it. You'll be kissing by the third date, if not earlier.

So I get that these characters becoming close enough to confide in each other in such a short amount of time is "realistic," but it was portrayed terribly. First Ember was chasing Wade to city hall in order to stop him from delivering all thirty citations for her dad's OSHA nightmare of a shop, then they were going to the airball game to convince Side Character to forgive the citations in question... and then out of nowhere they swap from Ember trying to get Side Character's attention to trying to emtionally invest us in the game?

Okay, that's not completely fair. They're not trying to get us to care about the game, but rather care about Wade being able to bring strangers together in order to make a difference. And that would have been a really genuine character moment - if it hadn't appeared out of nowhere with zero warning. All of a sudden we're not just supposed to be able to sympathize with this flabby water boy, but we're also supposed to believe that Ember of all bloody people is finding herself inspired by him.

Maybe you could excuse this sudden and inexplicable change in tone by referring to the earlier scene in which Wade calls her hot (because she set his bag on fire), because this was clearly (and I mean clearly - they might as well have painted it across the television) what we like to call a Foreshadowing. I wasn't actually aware that I was getting myself into a romance story for this film, but that little scene awhile back clearly established "oh... that's what's going on."

But it wasn't a good introduction to the idea, it was just half-baked foreshadowing. It just...

It doesn't work.

It just doesn't.

Once the two of them start dating, I eventually forgot that awkwardness and allowed myself to accept this new thing as the status quo. Obviously it was just a third-act breakup waiting to happen, given how uninspired the film had been so far, but I thought the little montage of them going places was... okay, if a little bland and somewhat disorienting. The rest of the movie continued to be poorly-paced overall, but the first act was easily the worst offender.

There was a scene where they introduced Ember to Wade's family (including the obligatory lesbian couple, who at least gave off the Gay Vibes throughout the tastelessly blatant rainbow marketing), where they began to hit some incredibly cliche Accidental Racism things, which actually hit me with something of a narrative whiplash given the fact that so little of the last fifteen minutes had actively focused on racism as a bad thing - which, of course, brings me to the massively conflicting (and not in a good way) Themes of the movie.

I think, conceptually, the list of themes made sense. There's the parallels to Asian-American immigration, of course, as well as a slight lean into generational trauma, accepting yourself, following your dreams... and again, these sorts of things are very much connected to the overall theme of "Identity," which is a great way to go for pretty much any film.

The problem here was that each individual theme was so bizarrely disconnected that it took several minutes of me trying to piece together what the hell they were trying to say before I figured it out. It starts with racism, of course, followed by the expectation from Ember's father to take over the business - which, of course, is something she also believes she wants, despite how stressful it might be. Then she meets Wade, hijinks ensure, and suddenly there's another theme about bridging gaps between cultures because of True Love - which is then followed up by Continued Racism, which...

Okay. I'm a white boy. I'm a straight, white, cisgender, standard-issue American male. I'm what you get when you reset the action figure to factory settings. As such, I can confirm that white people do not experience racism, and thus I am unqualified to analyze it in any really meaningful way.

But can someone explain to me why the clearly Asian-coded dad character was so much more scornful of outsiders than literally everyone else combined. There were a total of maybe three whole mini-scenes that portrayed actual disregard for him on account of his element, while approximately half of his lines were just going on and on about how awful Water people are.

In hindsight, those cliche Accidental Racism lines from Wade's family make so much more sense - not because they were well-written in any regard, of course; they were bland, uninspired, and then completely ignored for the rest of the movie. But if I had to guess, the writers added this scene because they needed more examples of how the fire people were being oppressed, so they just wrote in some random obligatory lines and called it a day. Seriously, there was just one "You speak so clearly!" line, and then they moved right back to The Romance.

But I digress. A lot. That was a lot of digression.

ANYWAY

I think the reason why the themes were so poorly-established in this movie was because they were each only ever given a couple indvidual scenes to single them out, and zero reason outside of The Plot to actually tie them together. First you have Wade telling Ember that her anxiety is telling her that she shouldn't take over her father's shop, which is followed up half an hour later by his mom offering her a job at some glassworks; then you have the theme of interracial romance (which is... a little weird to have as a theme, but okay), which is only ever touched upon about once every three actual Romance scenes.

So when the obligatory third-act breakup has the "we can't be together" because Ember can't bring herself to abandon her dad's shop, it just felt really clunky and pointless. I thought that maybe the movie could redeem itself by having her trapped in a cycle of confusion as to all these conflicting ideas, which would have made for a decent character moment if not for the obligatory Climax Reunion completely disregarding how she completely rejected Wade in favor of Action Sequence.

Also he... "died" at the end. No, he didn't. We all knew that. Any and all of the physical "suspense" scenes were completely devoid of sakes and intensity; this isn't a movie where people die in action sequences. Surprise, surprise, she just needs to pretty much admit her love for him in order to bring him back. This is a movie for babies, they're not going to kill off Funny Water Guy.

So what are my thoughts, overall? I have very little. Maybe the massive wall of text you have all just witnessed might suggest otherwise, but I think I'm just using this movie as an excuse to get back in the groove of actually analyzing narratives, because I should clarify that I did not hate this movie. I barely disliked it, even - I just very much did not like it, either.

The movie made me think and feel nothing. It was so superficial and bland that I spent most of it drawing that cool wizard lady (which turned out pretty okay, actually). I guess the two protagonists were eventually cute and endearing enough that I could appreciate them hanging out together, and I thought the scene where the finally decided to touch for the first time and share a dance was actually... I'm going to say "decent." Again, the pacing was awful, and so I couldn't appreciate it fully - that's probably why the kiss at the end felt so forced and unnecessary.

But other than the two of them, I felt exactly nothing for literally everyone else. In fact, the only thing I ever did feel was mild frustration at the overuse of the "Liar Revealed" and "The Misundersanding" tropes, because if you're going to write a story about an adult romance then you should let them have adult conversations, dammit.

To say I hated it would be a disservice, because that would imply I have a level of emotion towards it whatsoever. It was not as terrible as The Rise of Skywalker or The Book of Boba Fett or the Live Action Little Mermaid. It was just incredibly pointless, and provided me with nothing to think about except how I wasn't thinking about anything.

So in the end... is it the worst Pixar movie? Does it make the bottom of the list?