Pixar’s Elemental gets a lukewarm reception at its Cannes premiere
Reviews for the studio's latest praised the film's lush visuals, but were far more divided on its script
Aux News Elemental
The Cannes Film Festival wrapped up today with one last big world premiere, with Disney rolling out Pixar’s next film, Elemental for those who didn’t opt to ditch on the festival early to beat the proverbial traffic. But the film—about a fire lady and a water man who find love in a city inhabited by representations of the classical elements—is getting lukewarm reviews from critics.
Take THR’s write-up, which accuses the film of feeling like it was made by “an algorithm putting together a perfect Pixar movie,” i.e., “entirely predictable.” Deadline targets the film’s humor, saying in its review that, “There just isn’t a line or a situation that would make you laugh out loud,” and stating that, “There are bits that are just plain dull.” Variety: “The whole scenario seems forced: so much world-building to tell a story better suited to flesh-and-blood human characters.” The Radio Times refers to the film’s plot as “basic,” and while it gave a tepid-leaning-positive review overall, the outlet notes that the film doesn’t take its themes as seriously as it could.
(Most critics did agree that those basic ideas were pretty interesting, at least: The film centers on an immigrant community of Fire people working to establish their own identities in a version of New York City largely controlled by a majority population of Water folk, with a relationship between a young Fire woman, played by Leah Lewis, and a Water guy, played by Mamoudou Athie, at its center.)
One place pretty much everyone who’s seen this thing was positive about, though, was the film’s visuals, which are routinely described as visually dense and gorgeous. At the very least, it’s enough to make us glad Disney’s not dumping the studio’s output straight to streaming anymore; Elemental lands in theaters on June 16.
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The film centers on an immigrant community of Fire people working to establish their own identities in a version of New York City largely controlled by a majority population of Water folk, with a relationship between a young Fire woman, played by Leah Lewis, and a Water guy, played by Mamoudou Athie, at its center.So, Moist Side Story?
I was thinking more along the lines of “Guess Who’s Flowing to Dinner.”
At least it’s not as cheesy as ‘Driving Miss Blazey’.
The Godmudder
“On The Waterfront.”…wait.
Flameo and Wetliet
Dewliet
Was ‘Wet Side Story’ too basic?
“Surprisingly Steamy for a Child’s Film!”
Pixar has been making the same movie with small tweaks for 15 years or so now.
I was watching an old episode of American Dad the other day and there was a gag about a character seeing “The latest Pixar movie, ‘Clothes’. It’s about the secret life of clothes….John Ratzenberger voices a tie.”In 2009, that joke felt a little reductive. After I saw the trailer for this one, I thought “Eh, they weren’t far off.”
“The latest Pixar movie, ‘Clothes’. It’s about the secret life of clothes….John Ratzenberger voices a tie.”It’s about a 10-year-old girl who really wants to become a fashion designer and designs this new dress but of course her parents being Strict…eh, let’s pick a marketable but safe minority for Disney…Belgians instead want her to drop all her dreams of becoming a fashion designer and instead go to work her family’s waffle iron factory because that’s all Americans know about Belgium save for beer and guns and Disney’s not gonna do beer and America’s children know enough about guns that they’d just pick holes in any inaccuracies and have their suspension of disbelief completely shattered. When she goes to shove her half-made dress in a box of old clothes in the attic, it speaks to her and suddenly she realises she can understand clothes.Yada yada, there’s 80 minutes of hiding this from her family and friends (except for that one weird fat kid with glasses she’s friends with whom she confides in), as hearing the lamentations of every single piece of clothing she comes in close proximity to and awkwardly offering unsolicited fashion advice to random strangers, her school has an art competition and she enters and wins not just the top prize, but her parent’s support for her dreams because her dress design integrated waffle irons somehow.
Make the cheque for $5,000,000 out to me for cash, Iger, you soulless, dead-eyed ratfuck.
Yes, and as such, I’m looking forward to Pixar’s Spice Rack.
I hear Jason Manzoukas is voicing the Cummin.
I only saw the trailer for Elementals recently, and my instant reaction was that it looked like the most generic version of what would happen if you merged every Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks animation of the last decade or so into one.
People have for years mockingly questioned why the cars in Pixar’s Cars movies are made to exist in a human-like universe. Sure, kids love it but this anthropomorphism doesn’t really make much sense and is truly illogical, and it’s in this latest movie as well… I can only take so much of it.
This sounds like that Lasseter movie from last year, Luck. More interested in its world building then a story. That movie was called diet Pixar. Oh boy…
Luck felt like a movie written by an AI with the parameters “Pixar movie, tik tok, plays well in China”
I tried that with llama.cpp running Manticore-13B (an open source LLM that runs on your own computer rather than using some corporate server) and produced the following, which sounds better than Elemental.Title: “Tick Tock”
Summary: In a magical world filled with talking animals and enchanted creatures, a young clockmaker named Tick must embark on a journey to save his beloved village from the evil plans of the villainous Crook. Along the way, he discovers secrets about his past, learns valuable lessons about friendship and courage, and overcomes many challenges to prove that even the smallest creature can make a big difference in the world.
Act 1: Tick’s village is under threat from Crook, who wants to destroy it to fulfill his own selfish desires. Tick sets out on a journey to seek help from a wise old owl, who tells him that the only way to stop Crook is by completing a special task that will grant him magical powers.
Act 2: Along with his friends and allies, Tick embarks on a quest to find the magical objects needed for the task. They face many challenges along the way, including battling dangerous creatures and overcoming obstacles. Through their adventures, they learn valuable lessons about teamwork, loyalty, and bravery.
Act 3: As Tick and his friends finally gather all the necessary items, Crook launches a final attack on the village. Tick must use all of his courage and determination to complete the task and save his home. With the help of his friends, he manages to defeat Crook and restore peace to the magical world.
Conclusion: Through their journey, Tick and his friends have learned that even the smallest creatures can make a big difference in the world. Tick’s village is saved from destruction, and he returns home as a hero, having proven that anyone can overcome great challenges if they believe in themselves and work together with others.
IDK why’d they’d even take that movie to Cannes, but sure.
“Hey, everything gets standing ovations there. Let’s give it a shot.”I’m guessing that was about the level of thought.
“Hey, everything gets standing ovations there. Let’s give it a shot.”*slams fist down on table* But, dammit man, for how many minutes?
Probably thinking they had another artist triumph like Up. Hollywood movies showing up and working at cannes are rare, but it happens, and if you succeed, you get a month of free acclaim from international press to hype the movie. Or you get a month of negative Indy 5 reviews to stress about before opening day.
Is this the film festival who love to do 10 minutes long standing ovation for the simplest thing?This film somehow got “lukewarm” response from that crowd?
It’s a Pixar movie, so they were probably sobbing quietly in their seats.
the latest trend is that if you want to make a movie with stereotypes, bigotry, or blatant racism, you disguise the characters as animal, or something else. Don’t believe me, who voices gorillas?
Well in Sing/Sing 2 it was Taron Edgerton and Peter Serofinawitz…whats your point?
Rosie O Donnell?
That’s right! British actors! Always the British! Wake up sheeple!
that might have been a trend and/or still be a trend, but I disagree that it’s anywhere even close to being the “latest trend”
The “latest” trend? You must be young.
These are movies that are still primarily aimed at children, and we really want to go down the “the plot feels basic” line of criticism?
i’m skeptical most of the writers on these are specifically trying to aim the movies at children, regardless of what Disney corporate wants
Are we still doing the “aimed at children” therefore it doesn’t matter if it sucks line of criticism?
A basic plot doesn’t automatically means it sucks…
Are we still doing the “these cartoons are aimed at children“ line of thinking?
i mean they are ‘aimed’ at children let’s be real.
But kids don’t care for love stories.
This is a movie that was shown at Cannes, a festival devoted to excellence in film. We really want to go down the “Critics should not critique things at a festival mostly attended and reported on by critics” line of criticism?
Other films that premiered at Cannes: X-men the last stand, the last two indiana jones movies, shrek 2, and a whole bunch of other Pixar stuff. Those movies aren’t trying to get the Palm D’or, it’s as much a commercial venture as an artistic one nowadays, same as TIFF or Sundance.
And they all got critiqued too, for good or ill. Yet no one batted an eye, pretended it was bad form, or tut-tutted that critics need to lie about or mitigate their experience with a mediocre kid’s film just to satisfy some ludicrous presumption towards necessary shittiness in films that are rated G. Lazy is lazy, and things that aren’t magical can be reasonably reported on for their lack of magic. This ain’t the 3rd grade music recital, we don’t have to clap just because they tried, lol.
This seems like the kind of movie that, were it released in 2021, would be debuting exclusively on Disney+.
Pixar seems trapped at this point by its legacy. Its use of tropes and genre in the past to tell very human stories has really fallen away. The absolute ease (or appearance of ease) is gone from their creations. The conceptual part of the company is alive and well but the beating heart of WHY a story needs to be told feels missing. They may also feel hindered by the need for Pixar movies to be PIXAR MOVIES — prestige-y masterpieces. That can bog creatives down in IMPORTANT ISSUES when sometimes the best storytelling is done on the small scale, zoomed in. That said, I loved Turning Red and Coco. But most other films have either benefitted from sequel legacies (Monsters, Incredibles, etc.) or flopped with concepts no one cared about (Good Dinosaur, Luca, Onward). Soul sits somewhere in the middle. It’s not a great Pixar movie, but it has enough beauty and fun to keep it from the dustbin. Lasseter’s absence isn’t the problem. His work outside Pixar has shown that these kinds of films need some fresh blood and creative practices. Maybe he was the secret sauce (or maybe he just wanted it to look that way) but that sauce is expired.
I’m in the same ballpark, but I feel reversed in that I think they very much have the “why” locked down, and it’s the conceptual parts that need to improve.
One of the things that made Golden Era Pixar look like wizards was how they took the simplest of premises and turned stories out of them. We all love that, but the people at Current Pixar now seem too concentrated on that part, without being more dedicated to the less savory part that equation: The work-shopping and work-shopping of those concepts until they have depth beyond just being gimmicks.
Old leadership were notorious taskmasters, and I suspect a shift that changed that culture has also had the adverse effect on the products in these kinds of ways. I’ll get flack for this, but I’ll outright say I don’t think the artists are being pushed hard enough. “Good enough” is good enough, in a way it didn’t used to be. As for their legacy, and the pressure to be prestigious, I for one hope that never lets up. At the very least, it forces a need for emotional endings, and even for Pixar’s weaker output, these scenes continue to be a saving grace.
I considered Coco the reverse Up: the entire weight of the movie is ultimately packed into the last ten minutes, leaving you with 90+ minutes of a movie that’s just sort of… there. And I think non-opening parts of Up were far stronger than the non-ending parts of Coco.
Coco’s problem, really, is that it lacks the courage of its convictions. There’s a really interesting movie about finding familial redemption when you’re a fuck-up who sucked like Coco’s grandfather: in the better version of the movie Coco would reach Ernesto and b feted and celebrated but Ernesto would go: kid, I know you want me to be your grandfather, but I’m not – your grandfather really is this kind of pathetic loser who selfishly dipped on his family and now regrets it in death, and its up to you to decided if that’s worth forgiving. And so the lat act, rather than a lushly-animated by narratively0tensionless chase sequence, is given over to that: a child coming to terms with family being complicated, as tory I think kids need. But Coco bails on this idea: nah kid, you grandfather loved his family, he was just murdered by Bad Guy Ernesto who now wants to double-murder him so go on a big chase and try and save your grandpa’s reputation.
And it’s fine. It’s fine! Coco is not a bad movie – my mom and I watch it ever year or two and cry at the end bit. But the end bit, crucially, relies more on the emotional gut-punch of Anthony Gonzalez singing-while-crying and Ana Ofelia Murguía’s vocal performance than it does the fact that a bunch of skeletons just got chased by a giant bird. Turns out Coco’s shitty [great]-grandpa was a loving grandpa and just got murdered so we can forgive him very easily for his crime of going off to earn money for his family. It’s a cop-out. It’s fine. But it’s not Woody pushing Buzz out a window because he’s petty, it’s not Bob genuinely not being there for his family because he’s being self-absorbed and selfish, it’s not Woody almost getting everyone killed (again) because he can’t let go. It’s all external: a bad guy did it.
When you watch that beautiful scene at the mid-point of the where that old ghost double-dies forgotten by his family, wishing he could make it up to them, you see the shape of the film as it should have been: Héctor accepting responsibility for being a selfish fuck-up in life and finding incredible grace in having this miraculous opportunity to find some ind of healing. He was a fuck-up, but he was still Mamá Coco’s father and she loved him and that matters. But the movie finds him a loophole, it absolves him of bigger sins by making it someone else’s fault, and the movie just limps home from there.
So that’s my frustration with Coco. But then I think Luca is an underrated Studio-Ghibli-esque quiet masterpiece—a movie whose sense of place is so strong and whose stakes are so refreshingly low and whose complex queer themes so poignant and meaningful to me, yeah I said it!—so you might think I’m a total lunatic. And I cried during Cars 3! Throw me in the mad house with the people who try to do redemptive readings of Cool World and Attack of the Clones. Listen fellow inmates: Superman Returns runs an hour too long but it’s still the best Superman movie in the last thirty years! Is aid it and I don’t care that I said it! I’ll bite your nose off! I’ll bite all your noses off!
(We can at least agree The Good Dinosaur is not just bad but deeply unpleasant, right? It’s a strangely nasty movie, and hideous to boot?)
The problem with Coco is that there’s a perfect Day of the dead film aabout a guitar playing guy with family pressures to be a certain way going to the land of the dead, unfortunately its The Book of Life and it came out before Coco .
I keep meaning to see that.
I agree with so much of what you have said. Including your take on Superman Returns
I won’t stand for luca slander! That film was wonderful. How was it a flop?
I never saw it, but I can only assume because they didn’t make heavy, heavy use of the song “My Name Is Luca” and if they did then it’s the opposite of what I said.
I loved Luca. Last summer we spent a week at my parents cottage. No internet or cable, only DVD player. We brought a lot of movies from the library including Luca. Our toddler (3 years old at the time), watched Luca so many times and loved it way more than any of the other more age-appropriate movies we brought. It is such a sweet movie and I loved the music and scenery.
That’s really lovely and wholesome. I enjoyed Luca a LOT for being a really nice, funny film about friendship. Deliberately low stakes but a gentle story well acted.
Luca is basically a gateway drug to Studio Ghibli stuff too, so maybe when your toddler gets a little older, they might enjoy those too. Ponyo is probably the closest one to Luca from them.
I think Pixar now is where Disney was in the mid seventies and eighties , their output is , fine I guess , but nothing amazing, and not the ‘events’ that their old stuff was ( as someone who grew then , and can count the animated Disney films of that era I really liked on one finger ( The Black Cauldron), I’ve seen this before.
There’s an interview I read something like 15 or 20 years ago, with an animator key to the Disney renaissance, and it was about the value of a good producer/studio boss. I don’t remember who it was, or where I read it, but it went something like this.Walt Disney himself wasn’t really a creative, but he had one gift, which was that he could visualize a completed film just from the storyboards or even the pitch. He would ask for changes at meetings or while talking to the people in charge of the project. Or he would just notice that something didn’t work there, sometimes failing to put a finger on what it was precisely but putting attention on it. It was almost an instinct. And that’s an hugely valuable skill, given that most of the budget in an animated movie goes to the animating phase, and when it’s done, there’s very little margin for fixing a scene or an act that doesn’t work, contrary to regular filmmaking, where you can reedit, do some partial reshoots, etc. They almost always have to start all over again. While Jeffrey Katzenberg was at the Walt Disney Animation Studios, the notes they got were helpful. It was, “It isn’t clear enough why this character becomes friends with this other character, you need to show why he would care.” After Eisner became sole in charge, it became, “This little girl’s sweater is yellow. Could you turn it to blue instead?” Given his track record with Dreamworks Animation (or the requests he made to Pixar during the making of Toy Story), I have issues with this view of Katzenberg, it might have been more of a collective thing due to the team he has assembled at Disney, but it’s true that he left Disney in 1993, while The Lion King was close to being completed, and that the next projects didn’t reach the creative heights they had between Little Mermaid and Lion King.That said, for a while, Lasseter appeared to have the same touch, the same instinct, making a lot of tough decisions that saved projects at Pixar, then at the Walt Disney Animation Studios too. He relaunched the Rapunzel/Unbraided/Tangled project that was originally supposed to be Disney’s response to Shrek but that the original director wanted to refit into a straighter version. It was also at this point that Disney came up with a CGI equivalent of their traditional graphic style for fairy tales (while previous attempts were much more generic). Tangled, which had been the most expensive film ever released, managed to make money, it paved the way for Frozen, and it was a major step in the Disney Revival.That said, now that we have the reports from the THR exposé, it looks like Lasseter increasingly took a lot of credit for decisions made by his lieutenants, while his own skills deteriorated and he became an obnoxious mess. And Luck, the only project that he has supervised so far outside of Disney/Pixar is a mess. It’s more or less Monsters Inc. seen from the point of view of the intruder, but a new major rule or element of this convoluted universe gets introduced every ten minutes. Monsters Inc. was basically people working at a factory, a power plant that collects the cries of children, and everything you need to know, including the stuff with the doors, is established early on, so the plot and the relationships between the characters can develop. Luck needs a ton of exposition dialogue until the very end (an issue that I would call Tomorrowland-itis), and you can never relate to the movie, because the plot is too contrived. And if Lasseter wasn’t able to catch these glaring issues…
Turning Red was very good, and I’m not the target audience.
Based on the premise, this looks like a parody of a Pixar movie or a movie-within-a-movie that you’d see a quick fake trailer for in a Seth Rogen or Adam Sandler movie.
pixar flop era. when toy story 5 underperforms they’re in real trouble.
And they just keep cranking them out, while not listening to the audience.
I think the problem Pixar has now is the same which Star Wars has had since the early 2000s. When George Lucas made the OG trilogy, he made a love letter to old sci-fi serials intermarried with fairy-tale and mythology motifs. It felt both familiar and fresh. Now Star Wars is made by people who want to make Star Wars movies because they grew up with Star Wars.Classic Pixar had the immense creative drive of pioneering a technological innovation, feature-length CG animation, shaping the entire animation medium. It was also a young studio full of creators brimming with energy and inspired by the best that Golden Age Hollywood animation and the Disney Renaissance had to offer. Now Pixar movies are made by people wanting to make Pixar movies because they grew up with Pixar movies. Like modern Star Wars-makers, they’re creating an imitation that is not rooted in the originals’ creative influences, but in the product itself. That’s why it feels derivative rather than innovative.
So it seems like on viewing it comes off as exactly like the completely mediocre story it looked like in every trailer and description in interviews?
Shocked. Shocked!
I really wonder if the fire ppl and the water ppl learn to get along.
Wouldn’t it be wild if they didn’t? If the story did a sudden right turn and went deep into anti-miscegenation about fire and water people?
That would at least be surprising.
A simple message about strength from diversity. It’s cliche AF for sure… but only if you’re at least 15. Before that, though, it’s a profound message to many kids. Last time i checked the primary Pixar audience has & always been young kids. Kid audiences aren’t holding up 25 yrs of prior Pixar catalog use for close inspection. Pixar prints money for another 25 yrs.
I’ll be honest, I thought this was an Illuminations production when I saw the trailer.Can’t really explain what felt “off”, but it did.
See “The Good Dinosaur”, one of the few Pixar movies that missed much of that studio’s magic, they somehow gave that guy another project in this movie.
The Good Dinosaur was remade almost entirely from scratch after the original director stepped down when he admitted that they couldn’t crack a satisfying third act. Sohn, who was only supposed to be the co-director, stepped up and delivered a complete film in less than two years. It lost money, but it could have been much worse given the circumstances, and that’s why Pixar is giving him one more chance.
I wonder how many people will come just for the final Dug Days short.
Should be fun, hopefully. So will there be an Earth Wind and Fire song on the soundtrack?
Should be fun, hopefully. So will there be an Earth Wind and Fire song on the soundtrack?
He’s a water man, and she’s a sodium girl! Their families don’t like each other, period, and romantic relationships between the two groups are unheard of. All his life he’s heard that you’ve got to say “nah” to relationships with Na, because the whole situation is just “too explosive.” But what happens when the fall in love? Will this cause a good reaction, or will the whole thing just blow up in their faces? Find out in the next Pixar movie, “Alkali, I Like Ya!”
haha