Peter Sohn’s fire-and-water romance is one of the handsomest things Pixar has made in years and one of the most cluttered. When it leaves Ember and Wade alone together it is lovely; the rest of the time it is filing paperwork.
Peter Sohn’s second film for Pixar imagines a city where the four elements live side by side and mostly do not mix. Fire people keep to Firetown, a district of stacked shopfronts and coloured lanterns where Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen) and Cinder (Shila Ommi) run a shop they expect their daughter Ember (Leah Lewis) to inherit. A burst pipe floods the basement, and out of the water climbs Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a city inspector who cries at almost everything and now has to report the leak. Elemental is a decent, good-hearted film with a romance worth your evening and a script that keeps pulling the lovers apart to attend to plumbing. It runs 102 minutes, and about forty of them are the film it should have been.
The look is the reason to go. Don Shank designs Element City as a place built by and for water: canals where roads should be, fountains on every corner, trains whose carriages slosh, so that a fire person crossing town is taking a risk with every step. David Juan Bianchi and Jean-Claude Kalache light Ember as a flame with a face, and the face stays readable however hard she burns; when she loses her temper she goes blue-white and the air around her heats up with her. Wade is translucent, the city visible through his chest, and the animators never let him quite settle, so he always looks about to spill.
Athie gives Wade a soft, unhurried sincerity that would be unbearable in a live actor and is charming here; he weeps at a sunset, at a kind word, at his own sentences. Lewis plays Ember with the clipped impatience of someone who has heard “one day this will all be yours” since she was small and has never once been asked whether she wants it. Catherine O’Hara turns up as Wade’s mother Brook, and a dinner at her flat, where the family compete to make one another cry, made us laugh harder than anything before it had prepared us for. Del Carmen’s Bernie is tired, proud and coughing, and the film is at its most honest whenever he is in the shop.
The trouble is everything else. The screenplay, by Brenda Hsueh, Kat Likkel and John Hoberg, gives Ember a leak to fix, an inspection to pass, a flood to explain, a talent for glass she has not noticed, a rare flower she wants to see and a father who wants to retire, and it rotates through them at speed. Every time she and Wade are alone and the film slows down to watch them, a plot point knocks on the door. The immigrant story is set out in the opening minutes, a family off the boat with a suitcase and a blue flame, and then restated rather than developed; a water woman on the train tuts at “fire people” and the film moves on. The rules about who can touch whom bend when the script needs them to.
Thomas Newman’s score is warm strings with a shimmer over the top, and the song “Steal the Show” arrives on cue for the falling-in-love montage. Stephen Schaffer cuts to keep all those threads in the air, so the film hardly sits still, and the scenes that land are the few he lets breathe.
One did. Late on there is a scene between Ember and her father in the shop, no more than a couple of minutes, that we will not describe, and it got past our guard completely. We had spent an hour mildly irritated by the paperwork and were not expecting to be moved by a gesture as small as a bow. That the film can do this and does it so rarely is the real disappointment.
Sohn’s The Good Dinosaur (2015) had too little story; this has too much. Inside Out (2015) made its metaphor the plot. Here the metaphor and the plot sit next to each other on the sofa and do not speak.
Take a child, or someone you are fond of, and do not expect to talk about it much afterwards. It carries a PG and is gentle for one; the flooding is loud but nobody is in danger for long. Wade would cry at that sentence. We did not, but we came closer than we expected.
