Pixar spent seven years and a reported $200 million to ask a simple question: can fire and water connect? Elemental answers with a shrug, a few lovely images, and a romance that never quite catches. Peter Sohn directs from a script he wrote with John Hoberg, Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh. The film runs 102 minutes. It lands at 5.8 of 10.
Trailer, via Pixar.
Ember Lumen and the Fireplace
The setup is the strongest thing here. Fire elements Bernie and Cinder Lumen immigrate from Fire Land to Element City, where the other classical elements — water, land, air — greet them with racism. They build a life, start a convenience store called the Fireplace, and raise a daughter, Ember.
Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen) plans to retire and hand the store to Ember once she can control her temper. Leah Lewis voices Ember. Sohn cast her off The Half of It (2020), saying “she could be hot-tempered, but still very appealing” and that “she had a vulnerability in her voice that also she could straddle with being so sincere and authentic.”
That is a real idea for a character. A daughter who is expected to inherit a life she did not choose, in a city that never wanted her parents. For a while, Elemental looks like it will do something with it.
A Burst Pipe and a City Inspector
Then the plot machinery arrives. Bernie lets Ember run the store alone on the day of a sale. She is overwhelmed by customers and rushes to the basement. Her fiery outburst breaks a water pipe and floods it.
The flood summons Wade Ripple, a water element and city inspector voiced by Mamoudou Athie. He notes the faulty plumbing. Ember cannot stop him. Wade goes to City Hall and files a report with his air element boss, Gale Cumulus (Wendi McLendon-Covey), who will shut the Fireplace down.
Ember hides all of this from her parents. She does not tell them she caused the burst. Wade takes her to Cyclone Stadium to plead with Gale. He had been hunting a leak in the city’s canals before he reached the Fireplace, and he suggests the two of them can trace it from the store. Gale agrees to forgive the violations if they find and seal the leak by the end of the week.
Sandbags, a Dam, and a Deadline
The leak hunt gives the film its middle act. Ember and Wade search the canals and find a hole in a dam. Wave runoff from ships is flooding the city’s plumbing. They plug it with sandbags. The sandbags eventually fail, and Ember melts the sand into glass to seal the breach.
Between the errands, the two spend time together in the city and learn about each other. Cinder (Shila Ommi) starts to suspect her daughter is seeing someone. That is the whole of the romance’s architecture: a deadline, a dam, and a mother’s suspicion.
Sohn has said the concept began with a single question — whether fire and water could ever connect. The film draws on his youth as the son of immigrants in 1970s New York City, and on romantic films including Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), Moonstruck (1987) and Amélie (2001). The production team studied point-of-view city tours of Venice and Amsterdam on YouTube for inspiration.
A Voice Cast Built for the Elements
Sohn wanted the voices to sound like the elements. Ember needed a smoky voice; Wade needed a cooler one. Athie won the part on the strength of his role in the 2019 miniseries Oh Jerome, No and his ability to cry. Sohn called a cry from that series “sincere, but hilarious,” adding, “Mamoudou has such a compassionate soul that when he was crying, you just went with him in it.”
Lewis and Athie were announced at the D23 Expo on September 9, 2022. The full trailer on March 28, 2023, brought the rest: del Carmen, Ommi, McLendon-Covey, Catherine O’Hara as Brook, Mason Wertheimer as Clod and Joe Pera as Fern. Matthew Yang King voices Alan, Lutz and the Earth Pruner. Clara Lin Ding voices Little Kid Ember.
On May 30, 2023, MotoGP rider Francesco Bagnaia was announced as the voice of a character named Pecco, after his nickname. It is the fifth Pixar film to put a motorsports figure behind a character, following Charles Leclerc and Carlos Sainz Jr. in international dubs of Lightyear (2022) and assorted NASCAR and Formula One drivers across the three Cars films.
Where Elemental Loses Its Heat
Here is the problem. Elemental has a city worth looking at and a metaphor worth arguing about, and it spends most of its 102 minutes on a plumbing inspection.
The leak plot is not a story. It is a series of tasks that keep Ember and Wade in the same frame until the movie decides they are in love. Gale’s one-week deadline manufactures urgency without stakes, because the audience never learns what the Fireplace means to anyone outside the Lumen family. The sandbags fail. Ember melts sand into glass. Neither beat changes what Ember wants.
Worse, the film keeps the best conflict off screen. Bernie’s racism story is stated in the setup and then parked. Ember’s secret — that she broke the pipe herself — should be the engine of the whole thing. Instead it is a lie she carries quietly until the plot no longer needs it.
Athie is the film’s best asset. Wade is a character who cries easily, and the performance earns that instead of mocking it. Lewis has the harder job, since Ember spends most of the runtime clenched, and she finds the fear under the temper. The two are good together. The script just does not give them enough to be good about.
The Score: 5.8 of 10
Elemental is not a failure of craft. The design work is inventive, Thomas Newman’s score does what it can, and the immigrant-family material has real feeling behind it. It is a failure of nerve. Seven years and a reported $200 million produced a film that raises the question of whether fire and water can connect and then answers it with a municipal permit.
The tagline is “Opposites react.” They do, briefly. Then the movie files a report.
Key facts
- Title: Elemental (2023)
- Director: Peter Sohn
- Writers: John Hoberg, Kat Likkel, Brenda Hsueh, Peter Sohn
- Runtime: 102 minutes
- Score: 5.8 of 10 (Metacritic 58/100)
- Lead voices: Leah Lewis as Ember, Mamoudou Athie as Wade
- Studio: Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures
- Reported budget: $200 million
- Production time: seven years
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