The Elemental Experience
Before its release, Pixar’s Elemental was seen as nothing but a generic love story. Trailers made the movie look like your typical story about how opposites attract. Pixar took this literally as the movie was about opposing elements. After the movie was released, fans insisted that it was actually a well made movie that the trailers didn’t do justice. After hearing about it enough, I decided to watch it myself to form my opinion. I ended up surprised to find it as one of my new favorite movies.
Just like the trailers promised, it is in fact a love story about opposing elements in a world full of elemental beings, but that was only the subplot to the real story. Ember is a fire person and the starring character. Her story is about her dream to take over her father’s shop, all while her and her people are oppressed by the other elements. The movie doesn’t straight up say it, but the fire people are meant to be Asians. This is shown by the decorations in their shop resembling Chinese decorations, and all of Fire town strongly resembling Chinatown. Ember’s father moved to Element City in order to build a better life, but everyone in the city sees fire as inferior and dangerous. Throughout the movie, we’re shown how little respect Water people have for Fire people and how Ember’s father has an equal amount of hatred for them. This plot is expanded upon once Ember falls for the titular Water person, Wade.
Because of her father, Ember shares a similar dislike for water, but slowly warms up to Wade. Ember ends up meeting Wade’s family, and even though they welcome her in, there’s hints of racism such as Wade’s stepfather being surprised Ember can speak English well.
After the movie, I took a look at the creator interview that was also on Disney+. Narratively, the “seeds” of the movie plot came from his own upbringing as a Korean immigrant child living in New York City. Peter Sohn interviewed hundreds of others at Pixar in order to grow those seeds and better tell his story. The movie originally started out as a superhero movie, but Peter realized that’s not the story he wanted to tell. The characters went through many designs in order for them to show their emotions properly, which was important to Peter since he wanted them to react in a human way, despite not being humans.