Right from the first teaser trailer, Elemental was a movie that I was not sure about. My feelings that this may not be one of Pixar’s best movies stayed with each trailer that I saw. As my wife and I are big Disney fans, we still wanted to go and see this in the theatre, but when the credits rolled, I just had this “meh” feeling about it.
How to Download Elemental
You can expect to be able to download or stream the film from Disney+ in about two months after its theatrical release which happened on June 16, 2023. Click on the Download button at the end of this review and check the current availability.
The Movie Review
To be honest with Peter Sohn being the director, deep down I was hopeful that this would be good. I remember people not loving his The Good Dinosaur movie before it was released, but I really enjoyed it. So, I did have a deep-down hope that this movie might be one that just suffered from having trailers that failed to showcase what it was all about.
Well, that is not the case, Elemental is a movie that you will feel like you have seen a million times before. Let me ask you this, is there anyone in the world who has seen the trailer for Elemental and did not know right away what was going to happen by the end of the movie?
I did see a few reviews before I went to see it and a few of them talked about the movie being “woke”. To be fair “woke” is a term that is thrown around with every other movie these days, but in the case of Elemental, I get it. This movie is trying so hard to hit that racism/xenophobia thing that it is pretty eye-rolling-inducing if I am being honest. It does not feel like they had a good message they wanted to share, it was like they were doing it just to try and prove how good and progressive they are.
The idea of the movie is kind of cool, it takes place in a city where different elements live. We have a fire element called, Ember who works in her dad’s convenience store. Ember has a very “fiery” temper and her dad is going to give her the store, but she is not sure she wants it and is unsure of what she wants from her life.
She ends up running the store one day, but accidentally breaks a water pipe in the basement. This leads to the water element, Wade shows up to check it out and he ends up having to report a violation that could shut down the store. As you would guess, the fire and water elements do not mix or like each other, it really does come across as a forced “social commentary” thing.
Turns out that the store can be saved if they can find out what is causing flooding in the city and the only way that this can happen is if Wade and Ember work together. This is as by the numbers as you can get for Disney/Pixar and it was a very disappointing experience for me.
The best thing that Elemental has going for it is the way that it looks. I love the design of Element City and seeing the different elements living normal lives was fun way more fun that the story they were telling. The character designs are a bit of a mixed bag, but the use of color and the way that they are animated is kind of cool. The voice cast is decent enough, but I just did not care about the characters to get fully invested.
Had I just caught Elemental on Disney Plus in a few months I do not think I would have been sad that I never made the effort to see this in the theatre. This did not click with me (or my wife) at all. It was a very basic love story and a story that has been done a million times before, usually a lot better I might add! If you are unsure about this one, I would recommend just waiting for it to hit Disney Plus.
