Fire meets water in the teaser trailer for Pixar’s Elemental
Earth, fire, water, wind, but not heart: With Pixar's powers combined, this is Elemental
Aux News Pixar
Despite the increase in the number of Pixar movies over the last 10 years, in 2022, we’re only getting one. Elemental, Peter Sohn’s first Pixar film since the rare total misfire, The Good Dinosaur, hits theaters next June, but the teaser trailer will give you a taste right now. Just don’t burn yourself.
Living on the Soul and Inside Out end of the Pixar spectrum, Elemental is another one of Pixar’s lowkey dalliances into myth-making. “The story introduces Ember, a tough, quick-witted and fiery young woman, whose friendship with a fun, sappy, go-with-the-flow guy named Wade challenges her beliefs about the world they live in,” reads a press release. Much as Soul attempted to explain where inspiration comes from or how Inside Out personified emotions, Elemental does the same with the elements. Wind, water, fire, earth, and, presumably, heart will all get their own little humanoid representative in Element City, with the new kid in town, Ember (Leah Lewis), serving as our surrogate. As a fire thing, she has a harder time making friends, especially considering elements like earth are flammable and wind makes Ember grow.
Elemental comes at a strange time for Pixar. Despite the success of Turning Red, which went straight to Disney+, Pixar hit a critical and financial low point with Lightyear. Released last June, Lightyear was one of the few Pixar releases not to open at number one. Even more embarrassing, the studio was defeated by Jurassic World Dominion, a movie no one seemed to like, in its second week. It was the worst opening weekend for a Pixar release since Coco, and that movie was very good and went on to gross nearly $800 million.
Not counting the Disney+ releases, Lightyear is the worst-performing Pixar movie ever, failing to even top The Good Dinosaur. Can Elemental finally lure people back? Probably because its premise is not nearly as confusing as the Toy Story spin-off that wasn’t.
Elemental hits theaters on June 16.
47 Comments
Zootopia, but instead of racism they just want to smash.
Maybe I watched a different movie but the under tones of Zootopia was that everyone wanted to smash
…yeah, I think you watched a different movie.
If you’re seeing that I think that you’re not really seeing the under tones of the movie, but you’re in the group of people who had something awoken in them by the cute anthropomorphic animals.Zootopia was the Disney’s Robin Hood of the 21st century for getting people horny for animals
When I asked my wife if Zootopia awakened anything in her, she said “you mean the tiger on the bus?” a leeetle too quickly. Her subsequent denials of furryism notwithstanding…
See, in Inside Out a spunky yellow character unexpectedly befriends a shy blue character. In this one, a spunky orange-yellow character unexpectedly befriends a shy blue character. Anyway, this article’s casual Captain Planet reference was a nice piece of offhand snark. Of course Heart is an element! What else would it be?
“But what if the opening scene was super serious and sad, so then no matter what you’d always say “Boy, but those first ten minutes of Elemental…””
An organ?
I always thought that the fifth elemental power in ‘Captain Planet’ should have been lifeforce, and that Ma-Ti should have been able to use it to heal people … or if he really wanted, drain them of life completely.
Was The Good Dinosaur a total misfire? I thought it was a low-key charming movie that just didn’t reach the heights of golden-age Pixar. Seems better than Onward, fwiw.Also, this trailer wasn’t very exciting. I know it’s a teaser and all, but it didn’t really tease very much.
I would answer that question as, no, it was a very underrated film, but then again, I’m one of the few who really seemed to like The Good Dinosaur. Mainly because the timid character Arlo reminded me of my Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.Was not a fan of Onward.
I liked it too! There are dozens of us, dozens!
It bombed at the US box office and barely made even internationally. Didn’t get nominated for any Oscars either which is really low for a Pixar movie.
I thought it was awful.
IMHO, it was a bit too predictable and rote as a coming-of-age story, but had some stunningly beautiful visuals and a couple of scenes that really worked. I’d put it on the low end of Pixar’s oeuvre, but at worst I’d describe it as “just OK”.
Personally I thought it was a mess, but had some great work art-wise. It had a few stutter starts where it was creatively handed over and then re-worked, and you can tell. It it a quest? It it a boy and his dog? Is it a western? Bolt and Emperor’s New Groove (both Disney but not Pixar of course) got changed and completely overhauled by new creative teams, but they were gutted so much that you can’t see the original concepts and they both work. GD was more of a Frankenstein creation.
Visually, The Good Dinosaur was breathtaking but ultimately forgettable.
Next in “what if thing was people”
Also “what if thing did the opposite of what we think thing would/should do.”
Monsters are scared of kids, race car leans to slow down, dinosaur has pet boy, rat loves fine cuisine, robot is a romantic, and now fire and water mix.
What if dinosaurs, who are all dead, were alive instead. What if instead of normal things we had elf things. What if Buzz Lightyear was a realistic guy instead of a toy guy, even
though Woody spent an entire movie trying to convince him he was a toy
guy and not a realistic guy. What if we ran out of ideas
What if redneck tow truckWhat if redneck tow truck again
Coming soon from Pixar: Moe Gets a Cellphone.
The high concept is so much of a Pixar trope that it’s almost self-parody at this point, but if Sohn can successfully convey the feeling of his childhood growing up in an immigrant family in the Bronx during the ‘70s, it could make for a genuinely good film.
Pixar’s new film Musical asks: What if musical instruments were people? In this film, a nerdy, unloveable set of out-of-tune bagpipes falls in love with a sassy flute and learns an important lesson: that the music you play isn’t defined by the sounds that you make, but what’s in your heart.
Pixar’s latest blockbuster, Literary, follows a solitary, bitter and depressed copy of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. With the help of a carefree copy of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, ‘Cap’ must escape the clutches of the vicious crime lord Fifty Shades of Grey, discover what lies beyond the city of Bookshelf, and finally learn… to open up.In Pixar’s newest film, Quantum, devoted
family man Barry On finds his world shattered when a group of evil
leptons kidnap his wife and daughter! Does Barry have what it takes to
save his nuclear family? Or will he wavefunction-collapse in defeat?Objects,
the latest movie from Pixar studios, transports us to a world where
every single discrete item in the universe, from the particles of liquid
in your drink to the glass it’s in to the chair you’re sitting on to
the air you’re breathing to all the cells in your body AND the
individual body parts they comprise are all fully-sentient beings with their own personalities, desires, hopes, dreams and ability to talk! Witness a world where your every waking moment is a boundless nightmare of child-friendly quips, pop-culture references and moments of heartfelt catharsis that would make you weep if there weren’t 17 quintillion of them occurring within your earshot, every nanosecond of your life!
In a world where films themselves are alive, a spirited young animated movie tries to live up to her famous family’s legacy. The only catch is: she was born without a high concept! Watch her follow her own road to happiness in Pixar’s Pixar, in theaters whenever Pixar runs out of ideas.
Pfft. Those aren’t real elements. Get back to me when Pixar makes a movie about how spunky Oxygen encourages his reserved friend Xenon to bond with others.
I don’t think you can make a family-friendly movie about that slut Oxygen
Hydrogen is even sluttier. She bonds with everything.
xenon acted like that? how noble of him. pity he doesn’t bond well with others.
I heard he hooks up with Fluorine on rare occasions, though
Lightyear may not be great but it is so much better then the Good Dinosaur
Yeah, if Lightyear wasn’t trying to fit into the Toy Story universe, it would’ve been a serviceable foray into scifi for Pixar.Instead, the tie-into Toy Story was poorly executed. That isn’t a movie that Andy’s generation would have went crazy for. And also, the Zerg villain really wouldn’t make sense in the context of what we see in the Toy Story films themselves. Just some bad ideas.The Good Dinosaur, by contrast, I couldn’t get through 5 minutes of.
The thing with Lightyear that a lot of people miss is if you ask a group of 4 to 9 year olds. They loves that shit. And this isn’t just “kids like everything” thing. Lightyear actually is engineered as a movie to be a block buster sci-fi movie but toned down just enough to be fine for a seven year old to watch. I know my son and his peers love the damn thing. It’s actually going to end up making for a good Christmas for us because since it was not scene by many the toy sales have been terrible so all that Lightyear stuff is in deep discount. Means Santa’s budget goes a lot farther for us.
Interesting… my kids are a bit older (11/13) and they had zero interest in Lightyear, even though they saw all the Toy Stories. So your age range there might be spot on.
See I think that anyone who knows the Toy Story IP would stick their nose up at it. It’s so bizarre that they thought attaching it to this known IP would somehow elevate it’s performance? Truly boggling.
So are the fire people required to wear insulating hoodies at all times? Because otherwise you could kill an entire crowd of earth people just by bumping into one of them. Likewise shouldn’t the water people be wearing something to prevent them from killing a fire person through physical proximity?
This whole society is crap, this movie is going to end with half the population dying because a dude sneezed.
I’m more concerned about the guy who plucked a flower off someone on the bus. That looks like inappropriate physical contact to me, but no one else bats an eye.
You’re right, that flower is a PART OF HIS BODY. It’s like if you pulled out a clump of someone’s hair. Cloud Guy needs to go to prison.
It looks like they’ve repurposed the awesome clouds from that storks short that ran before…I dunno, maybe Brave? Anyway, the clouds were great and these clouds are same. Pixar extended universe y’all. That said, this seems like it maybe might not be good. Also, The Good Dinosaur was fine and somewhat charming with great photorealistic backgrounds. Lightyear should be sent to infinity and beyond for turning a fucking hero from Toy Story into the bad guy from his own goddamn movie. Lightyear was gorgeous but sucked for sullying the connection to Toy Story. You’re telling me Emperor Zurg was Buzz all along?! What a fucking shit show, not to mention it would make no sense to have Buzz the toy voiced differently than the movie it was based on. Oh my god. Sorry for the rant. Fuck Lightyear forever.
Not to be a dolt, but, of all the visualizations possible they picked on that looks just like Inside Out? And there was the one in Soul, too?
90s skater culture?
Elemental is another one of Pixar’s lowkey dalliances into myth-making.
The trailer kinda makes it look like a Pixar rom-com.
I liked The Good Dinosaur just fine. I might be wrong, but I think it was geared toward a much younger crowd than the usual Pixar fare. That might have affected its box office and probably its reviews.
Are these Chinese/Feng Shui elements? Is there Metal?
I misread the title. I though this movie was called ‘Emmental’ and would be about anthropomorphic cheeses falling in love.“I don’t know what it is, but just seeing you makes me all gooey inside.”
I feel like since I’ve heard about Elemental it sounded kind of simple? Not to say simple is bad but it doesn’t really spark my imagination. But hey you have a lot of room to play with, with a simple concept. And the teaser looked cute.
Also I’ve only seen Leah Lewis in the Half of It but that’s enough for me to say I really like Leah Lewis.
This is looking steamy.