Reaction Paper

Elemental

It is a movie about immigrants and their struggle to make a home for themselves in a new

environment that is often less than welcoming. Again, it’s a story worth telling and a tale worth

sharing, especially with young children.

Elemental is also about true love and the things that can keep young, star-crossed lovers

apart. It’s a tale as old as Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, or either of the two cinematic updates

both titled West Side Story. It’s that tale of forbidden love made seemingly impossible due to

cultural and ethnic differences that pull them apart.

In Elemental, we’re talking about the elements of fire and water, that is to say the

character of a young lady by the name of Ember and a young man by the name of Wade. They

are literally fire and water. Yet they somehow to fall in love with each other despite their

differences—differences that could become self-destructive.

On the surface, it would seem that Disney Pixar had the makings of another sure-fire hit.

It had all the right elements.

The problem with the movie is that it falls far short of the writing quality that we have

seen in previous Disney Pixar feature films. Additionally, it lacks the kind of visual magic that

we have come to expect.

Curiously, Elemental looks like a movie that was made half a decade ago, with flat,

throw-back, two-dimensional rendering of all the major characters.

 At times, they don’t seem like they belong in the same movie that renders background

images of crashing water and towering waves and fantasy cities and villages with stunning

photo-realism. The juxtaposition is jarring and puzzling, moreover, it is flat-out disappointing

when you consider what Disney Pixar is capable of creating on the big screen, which is pretty

much anything that their animation team can imagine.

Just about everything in Elemental falls short of our expectations. In the end, it’s a movie

with some commendable positive messages directed at a younger audience. It scores some

points for that. But while it is well-intentioned, it lacks the entertainment value that we have

seen before that appealed to both younger and older audiences.

To its credit, Disney Pixar is a victim of its own unrivaled success, to some degree. Over

the course of its illustrious career, it has rightly become the gold standard when it comes to

computer animated feature films. You could argue that no one else comes close when you

consider the magnitude or consistency of their success

Realistically, one has to expect a misstep occasionally. That is not to say that Elemental

is a bad movie. Kids will embrace it. It will most certainly make money. It just won’t be on the

list of all those other Pixar movies that are so affectionately burned into our collective

consciousness.