Projects #037 - "Elements don't mix."
Metaphor collapse as seen in Pixar's Elemental!
Projects Projects
Getting chilly out! Lots of catch up this week to distract from how little I have to say about Elemental! Let’s go!
Watching
Hawke Cast
It’s Hawketober! For some reason, all of Ethan’s projects are dropping within weeks of each other. We’re recording so many episodes! Available on your podcast feed now are the first episode on The Lowdown (episodes 1 +2) and Black Phone 2.
Coming soon: Blue Moon and the rest of The Lowdown!
Recent Reviews
As the weather chills, the movies… heat up?!? Links below to my most recent film reviews, as well as a lovely interview with Born in Flames director Lizzie Borden!
A House of Dynamite
Kiss of the Spider Woman
Roofman
Tron: Ares
Chainsaw Man - the Movie: Reze Arc
Lizzie Borden interview
2025 Films
If I Had Legs I’d Kick You dir. Mary Bronstein
Probably my most “John Waters saying Fat Girl is a ‘riot’” film of the year. This thing is vicious and it never stops being hilarious how much everyone hates Rose Byrne’s character. Just so hostile! As we left we heard someone say it was the worst movie they’d ever seen in their life. Damn! Too bad the exact events of the film will happen to them very soon…
Bugonia dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
Bald! Bald! Bald! Bald! (I liked it, but might need a little Yorgos break for a bit.)
Frankenstein dir. Guillermo del Toro
Went into it rolling my eyes, having heard tepid reactions from TIFF, but really enjoyed how violent it was. Jacob Elordi - he might be able to act? How many minutes of screentime do you think he’ll actually get in Euphoria season three?
Urchin dir. Harris Dickinson
Totally fine, don’t quite get the hype. It is very much a first film. Did critics think if they praised the film, Harris would kiss them? I guess it was worth a shot.
Horror
The Crazies
The Company of Wolves
An American Werewolf in Paris
Motel Hell
I have not watched nearly enough horror this month, but I did get two werewolf films in here. Please watch The Company of Wolves for some of the most disgusting transformation sequences on film.
Finishing Filmographies
Derek Cianfrance
The Light Between Oceans
Roofman
Please see my above review for Roofman, which I adored. The man makes a good picture! Even if Light Between Oceans is very boring.
TV
Peacemaker Season 2 (2025) (Final season?)
Stuck with this even after recovering from jetlag because I like Cena as an actor. This season plays to his strengths by tormenting his protagonist, having him kill an alternate universe version of himself and come face to face with his dead brother. Unfortunately, as is the fate of all ‘cinematic universe’ material, we are denied an actual climax and instead get a bunch of worldbuilding setup for whatever the hell comes next. Peacemaker will certainly be back, but what of his friends? Does anyone care? Do I?
Solar Opposites Season 6 (2025) (Final season)
Under the radar for its entire run, Solar Opposites was one of the only modern cartoons with a good joke ratio, plus a sexually charged gay marriage between two alien plants. Stupid and fun, def worth checking out if you’re bored.
South Park Season 27 (2025)
After a hiatus of at least fifteen years, I did start watching this season of South Park because my friend Ryan told me his NPR boomer parents were watching because it made Trump so mad. It just tickled me so much to know that Mike and Mary simply HAD to watch an animated Trump try to stick his micropenis in Satan’s asshole. Then it turned out this season was only five episodes, and the next five episodes are season 28. Are Matt and Trey trying to get out of their contract? Beyond their motivation to insult Trump, it’s pretty standard lazy South Park stuff. Labubus, tariffs, the antichrist, etc. etc. Remarkable in how quickly they ran out of steam.
The Morning Show Season 4 (2025)
Mostly embargoed but this is my favorite show on TV - I love how it feels like getting hit with a hammer over and over. This season added Boyd Holbrook as a podcaster named Bro Hartman and Jeremy Irons as Alex Levy’s insane dad. Please let me know when you all finish the season!
Hank Happenings
Pizza party!
Pixar Project #027 - ELEMENTAL (2023) dir. Peter Sohn
What if a girl made of fire and a boy made of water started to fall for each other? How could they connect when they’re so different? If you want to hear this question asked over and over again while experiencing the hostage situation that is having immigrant parents (according to the director not me! Not me!), then Elemental is for you.
Elemental features a smorgasbord of common Pixar ‘elements’ (hehe). We’ve got blobs, a fantastical cityscape, bureaucracies, border control, discrimination, internal rules and logic that make zero sense to me, and an opposites attract duo at the center. They just stirred a big pot of Pixar soup and strained some plot out. And yet Elemental BARELY has a plot. Like many modern Disney films, there’s no villain except poor structural planning and misunderstood feelings. Some crazy water person trying to flood the fire town wouldn’t help the drama, but it could add a little spice.
Ember (Leah Lewis) is the only daughter of fire people immigrants, working in the family convenience store outside city limits. Fire refugees from Fireland (we will get into it…) have made a lovely town despite discrimination against their species, though I’d understand a tree person not wanting their buildings to burn down. BUT I’M NOT AGREEING WITH THE RACISTS!!!! IT’S JUST SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS WITH MAGICAL RACISM!!! IT GETS CONFUSING! HAVE YOU SEEN ZOOTOPIA???
Ember is constantly told she will take over the shop “when she is ready”. This is a line oft-repeated through the film, as if they couldn’t find another story beat for our fiery protagonist. Her parents are loving but overbearing, contributing to her temper issues. She has little patience for annoying customers and water bullies who may wander in to cause problems. Do water people just run around Firetown killing them? Or do they just make racist remarks? How are any of them even alive? Do they have a core? Too many questions.
When Ember has a trial run manning the shop herself, a leak springs in the basement. However, it’s not just water - it’s a whole guy! Wade (Mamoudou Athie, who is REALLY good in Kinds of Kindness) is a very emotional city inspector who determines the shop is filled with safety code violations, and he has no choice but to shut the place down. Ember chases him into the big city for the first time, facing her fears to cut through bureaucratic red tape. Why do so many Pixar movies fall back on zoning issues and permits for their conflicts? How many Pixar employees are knee-deep in tree law violations?
While the quest to undo Wade’s foreclosure report is not particularly exciting1, the tension between Ember and Wade is starting to boil. Two people from different worlds, one fire, one water… how could they ever be together? In a sort of Pushing Daisies situation? Well, nothing to do but try! In a somewhat dangerous hormonal bargain, Wade and Ember hold hands. Ember doesn’t go out, nor does Wade evaporate. Things get quite literally very steamy! Perhaps their affection for each other keeps them stable? How would sex work? The metaphors of this world are a house of cards. They even call it out when the pair easily get through a chain link fence, asking ‘why do we even have these?’ Maybe if we had more moments of the characters knowing that none of this makes sense, my head would hurt less.
Wade takes Ember to meet his family, a wasp-y group of water folks who make some fire microaggressions (saying Ember is well spoken, asking invasive questions, the works). It’s a gentle take on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, if the floor threatened to turn Sydney Poitier to dust. Plus, Wade has a non-binary water sibling named Lake! Another beautiful, meaningful, exclusively gay moment from the Walt Disney Corporation. Thank you so much! Now I HAVE to spend thousands of dollars to go to Disney World and have a horrible time!
Wade’s family is impressed by Ember’s glass blowing skills, telling her she could easily get an internship at a prestigious art organization. She bashfully turns them down, saying that since her parents gave up so much to bring her to the new world, she could never walk away from the store. “The only way to repay a sacrifice so big is to sacrifice your life too,” she tells Wade. Someone needs a fire therapist! But they have a big dramatic fight, befitting a romcom climax.
Before the end of the film, I just want to address the tale of Fireland. Before Ember was born, her parents’ hometown suffered devastation in the form of the “Great Storm”. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the film where fire and water kiss, but it’s my job. We must ask - does the “Great Storm” represent the Japanese occupation of Korea? Maybe just the Korean War, to simplify? Again, I’m just asking. But do the fire people’s homes not kind of look like traditional Korean buildings? Peter Sohn’s parents are from Korea, and much of his work is about their cultural and language barriers. This film is about immigrant parents - it’s not coincidental nor subtle!
Firetown suffers a flood that Ember and Wade thought they had fixed. Everyone’s in danger, but Ember tries to save the sacred flame that her parents value more than anything, the only thing they were able to bring on their exodus. This leads to Ember and Wade trapped in the flume, where things are getting a bit too hot for our watery friend. Though Ember protects the flame, Wade seems to evaporate and die. He manages to reform pretty quick, but it’s still quite dramatic. It also raises further questions - when is a water person ACTUALLY dead? What is THEIR core? Can they reform from anything, anywhere? Are they gods? Not important. Ember and Wade kiss, Ember’s parents accept this interracial relationship and the fact that Ember’s ambitions will take her away from the shop. Happy ending!
Elemental is way closer to being successful than I expected going into it, making its shortcomings even more frustrating. I dig the romance aspect! Again, it makes me wish there could be a Pixar movie actually for adults! The score is cool and dynamic! The effects are impressive! But it’s just so STUPID! The element people raise so many questions that distract from the narrative, a narrative with no subtlety that keeps telling us the same things over and over again! We get it, being a child of immigrants is hard! Find other ways to express this than the same dialogue every five minutes! At least Domee Shi beats the crap out of her mom before their climactic hug.
Despite a shrug of indifference from general audiences and a soft opening, Elemental did leg it out to being successful in America. It made $54 million in Korea alone! There’s a secret fanbase of Elemental out there. They walk among us. I am not one of them.
Elemental: Two point five out of five stars.
From the archives
I did a great job of not actually saying how I felt about Elemental when interviewing the Pixar animator Becki Tower!
Mary Fran Corner
This movie is disappointing. I tried so hard to like it, but liking a Pixar movie shouldn’t require this much effort. This was actually my first time getting all the way through it. When it first came out, I tried multiple times and always fell asleep somewhere in the middle.
Elemental has all the ingredients of a great Pixar film: clever concept, interesting world, emotional core. But the delivery just falls flat. Maybe it’s the script? Maybe it’s the pacing? Whatever it is, it clearly bored me to sleep.
Elemental’s main character is Ember, a fire element living in Element City, where all the different elements coexist but mostly stick to their own neighborhoods. She and her parents, Bernie and Cinder (punny names that actually work! Good job, Pixar), run a small convenience type store called The Fireplace in the Fire District. The fire folks are the last group to have settled in Element City, so they’re under-resourced and looked down on—a pretty clear metaphor for immigration and class divides. That messaging seems to be handled fine, if not particularly nuanced.
Ember’s dad dreams of Ember taking over the family shop, but she has a temper. One of her “fiery” outbursts breaks a pipe in the store, bringing a water-element inspector named Wade into their lives. He threatens to shut the store down, but Ember convinces him to help her fix the problem, and naturally they fall in love. Which is where my stress begins. I get it—it’s about opposites attracting—but a fire element dating a water element feels too perilous. Literally perilous. Is the movie implying I’m prejudiced for being anxious about this? Because it genuinely just seems dangerous to me.
Wade and Ember’s relationship is supposed to represent emotional openness versus control, but it’s hard to get invested when half of me is worried she’ll boil him alive or he’ll extinguish her. Ember is complex and layered: angry, ambitious, and trying to live up to her parents’ expectations. Wade, meanwhile, is a crier. That’s pretty much his entire thing. He’s fine, just maybe underwritten.
Ember hides the truth about the burst pipe from her parents, but at a big party where her dad announces his retirement, Wade publicly confesses his love for Ember and also accidentally exposes her secret. In turn, Ember’s dad is furious, and then this dam breaks and the Fire District floods. Ember and Wade get trapped, and Wade evaporates (EVAPORATES!!!) until Ember’s tears somehow resuscitate (this can’t be the right word but I don’t know what is) him. They kiss and somehow live to tell the tale, Ember’s dad forgives her, and Ember admits she doesn’t actually want to run the shop after all. Ember’s dad retires, she starts an internship making glass, and she and Wade leave the city together.
It’s all fine but overcomplicated. There are moments where you can see what Pixar was going for (like themes of identity, immigration, and family expectations) but it feels like it never scratches the surface and the storytelling never quite clicks.
The end hints at a sequel, which feels embarrassing. Like Lightyear, Pixar seems to be tossing these movies out there hoping something sticks enough to make even more money with a sequel. Not even trying to be subtle anymore.
That said, Elemental is still “lightyears” (pun intended) better than Lightyear. I don’t hate it. In fact, I wanted to love it. It looks beautiful, has thoughtful ideas, and tries to say something meaningful. But it’s weighed down by a clunky script and a romance that literally shouldn’t work without one person bursting into steam.
I hate sounding so negative about this movie. But Elemental just let me down. I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed.
Links and Recommendations
Who gives a shit about this cloud sport? Quidditch ass.
calling myself in as a millennial who has almost passed out at shows (not for substance consumption reasons!) 2x in the past 2 years
wait I kinda love the elemental mascots