Elemental film review — Pixar romance mixes fire and water and fizzles

Receive free Film updates

We’ll send you a myFT Daily Digest email rounding up the latest Film news every morning.

Pity poor Elemental, the new Pixar animation reaching Britain less dead on arrival than facing a murder rap. Recently opened in the US, the movie was a box office disaster even by the precarious standards of modern Hollywood. So much so that this studiedly inoffensive film (directed by Peter Sohn) has been spoken of as a grave omen for the whole future of Pixar; a colourful albatross haunting parent company Disney.

Rubberneckers will find the reality an anticlimax. The movie is fine. Even those out to bury this vaguely psychedelic immigrant story as an example of liberalism run amok will struggle to stay outraged at the bubblegum vision of Romeo and Juliet, sweetly reconceived for the kindergarten set. 

As per the title, the characters represent the physical elements of Greek philosophy, though earth and air are reduced to bit parts. Instead, in a world where each element is akin to a national culture, the film maps the star-cross’d romance between a water boy (drippy) and a fire girl (aggro), whose father first migrated to the melting pot of Element City. (Whether other elements are indigenous is one of several issues of the plot that may trouble you on the way home.)

One cause of the movie’s downfall is hinted at in the paragraph above. Journalistic flourishes aside, read it back and imagine you are six. You know: elements. From Greek philosophy! The multi-layered high concept feels deathly laboured from the start. Using old Pixar movies as a stick to beat the new ones is lazy, but no audience young or old had to squint this hard at stories of toy cowboys, cheffing rats, or even the anthropomorphised emotions of Inside Out.

The other issue is the missing spark. Busy, zany and sincere, the movie does a perfectly good job with the stuff of urban culture clash (example: our heroine the only flame on a monorail). But it is also fatally unfunny, and gets more so with every weird contrivance it whips up. The result is like watching an overearnest entertainer at a birthday party: the harder they work, the more bored the kids look.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from July 7 and in US cinemas now