The Enshittification Of Pixar

'Elemental,' initially written off as a flop, grew legs and became a sleeper hit. It's also probably Pixar's worst movie.

Of all the hypotheses this newsletter is meant to test, one of the main ones is, are people willing to pay for criticism if it’s actually good? Early signs have been encouraging, but for now you won’t have to answer because this review is still free. But this experiment wouldn’t be possible without the paid subscribers, who are giving me the time and energy to try. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you all. Each new subscriber softens the blow of every pitch rejected for being too weird a little more. As they say, a healthy subscriber base means never having to admit you’re too weird.

Other Stuff

(I’m putting “other stuff” on top today, just so the people who maybe don’t want to read an Elemental review might actually see it).

-FORGIVE ME FATHER, FOR I HAVE BLOGGED. Specifically, I wrote up for GQ the new trailer for Dream Scenario, starring Nic Cage as a guy who keeps showing up in people’s dreams. It’s at least the second high-profile Nic-Cage-riffing-on-his-own-memeability movie (after The Unbearable Weight Of Massive Talent). I’m linking it here because the post turned into a bit of a meditation on Nicolas Cage As A Human Meme, and the history of how and when that happened. Also, I’m reclaiming the word “blog.” It means “good and important writing that is definitely not inferior to other forms of writing” now.

-STILL PODDING AFTER ALL THESE YEARS. By the time you read this, our latest Frotcast, with Brian Abrams and Joey Devine, will be live and free (on Apple Podcasts, our Frotcast host site, and Patreon.). Brian (a great writer I’ve known for years) is promoting his new book, “You Talkin’ To Me?” exploring the history of movie quotes. Get the book here. Some day I will be promoting my own. I swear.

That’s enough plugs for now, onto the review…

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Pixar/Disney

While it’s tempting to write off Pixar whenever they release a dud, they’ve had occasional misfires basically since the beginning, and it hasn’t taken away from their genuine classics. That not every release can be a winner is probably just the nature of movies, and of life in general. Even I, infamous ruiner of Inside Out’s 100% recommended rating, had to give Pixar their flowers for Turning Red, a weird-cool magical realist take on Lady Bird about Asian-Canadian tweens.

Yet Elemental, which just started streaming on Disney+, feels like a new low-water mark, not only derivative and lacking the usual inventiveness, but limply told and lamely conceived almost to the point of being self-devouring. If Onward was Pixar mailing it in to modest success, and Soul saw them overreaching (an attempt to define the metaphysical in way that came off almost insidiously corporate), Elemental is something worse: both unambitious and unsuccessful.

As with many things recently enshittified, the numbers will insulate Elemental’s failure for a while. Initially written off as a flop, and frequently lumped in with The Flash and the latest Indiana Jones movie in Hollywood-is-floundering thinkpieces early this summer, before Barbenheimer made theatrical viable again, Elemental fell out of the top spot quickly but lurked on the leaderboard all summer. It’s since become a sleeper hit and is now approaching $500 million in global box office. All of which would be great news if it were any good.

The story concerns anthropomorphized “elements” (Earth, Wind, Fire, and Water) who all co-exist peacefully, if a little uneasily, in the vast, gleaming metropolis of Element City. Our protagonist is Ember, the daughter of fire people, who are Korean-coded in ways that vacillate between weirdly timid and too on-the-nose. There’s a montage of Ember’s parents, Bernie and Cinder — their very names given to them by a customs agent who can’t pronounce the original “Firish” — being ostracized when they first arrive as immigrants to Element City.

“Dry leaves,” says an Earth lady apologetically, as she slams a door with a “for rent” sign on it in their faces (Earth people have foliage growing out of their heads and bodies).

Bernie and Cinder’s salvation eventually comes by way of an abandoned commercial space in Fire Town, which they fix up and turn into a convenience store selling the delicacies of their homeland. Fast forward to the present day, when early adult Ember (voiced by Leah Lewis, who sounds a little like a toned-down Awkwafina) struggles to get her father to stop working so hard and let her take over the store.

There’s a big problem with all this, and it should’ve been noted early in the brainstorming process: “Elements” are not great characters (though they did present the sudden revelation that Earth, Wind, & Fire had a snub in its name). They don’t have natural shapes and none of the character designer’s efforts to give them one make you think this was a good idea. They kind of just look like free-floating Dreamworks faces.

There’s also an obvious precedent for this whole story. In Zootopia, Judy Hopps, an ambitious bunny from the sticks, moves to the titular city to become the first bunny cop, befriending a fox and encountering species-based prejudice along the way (while also discovering biases of her own). I love Zootopia, and having seen it roughly 400 times since my toddler discovered it, I’m familiar with its rhythms.

Elemental shares many of them, only done worse. Its most obvious deficiency is that “elements” just aren’t cute in the way mammals are. They lag far behind kids (Coco, Moana, Encanto, etc), Dinosaurs (The Good Dinosaurs), elves (Onward), fish people (Luca), cars (Cars), and even the Scots (Brave). They also don’t have many obvious attributes to play with. How much can one really relate to a cloud? Sub question: Is a cloud even the best manifestation of “wind?”

Even beyond their general lack of cuteness and relatability, the elements also aren’t deployed well as the obvious race metaphor they’re meant to be. Zootopia was bold in using mammals as fodder for often hyper-specific race commentary (Judy exhorting her fox pal that “you’re not allowed to touch a sheep’s wool”; a plot hinging on demonizing “predators,” echoing Hillary Clinton’s comments on crime in the 90s). But what made Zootopia really sing was how simultaneously deft it was, specific about how prejudice and unconscious bias work, but rarely in a way that a single species was meant to be a stand-in for a specific race. (“Predators” were “a minority” in Zootopia, but they also controlled the levers of power; Judy faced discrimination, which was often sexism-coded, but not always… etc.).

In Elemental, “Fire People” are pretty obviously “Koreans.” Yet the movie is about as inconsistent about this as it is about as Bernie’s accent (which feels like the end result of studio notes wondering if it would read racist). The “Firish” people own convenience stores, enjoy spicy foods, and are loving but sort of intense parents. They also have their own foreign-sounding language, though none of the other elements seem to.

Because of this one-to-one specificity, Elemental is constantly making you wonder which Fire People attributes are meant to apply to Korean people and which are just riffs on the idea of “fire.” Ember, for instance, has a big problem. Demanding customers are always making her so angry that she explodes. In her defense, these customers do seem to be demanding to the point of sociopathy, like one guy who sees the “buy one get one free” sign on sparklers and keeps telling Ember, “I just want the free one.”

“That’s not how this works,” Ember explains, redundantly to anyone who isn’t utterly insane.

Is this scene based on the idea that Koreans are demanding customers? Is Ember’s fieriness a Korean quality, or just a Fire People one? You can see the dilemma here. A metaphor is meant to further a comparison, not muddle it.

One of Ember’s explosions one day (thanks to customers just knocking shit on the floor and ruining merchandise maliciously like total psychopaths) blows a pipe in the basement, which begins to flood. Suddenly a water man seeps through the pipes — Wade, played by Mamoudou Athie — a sensitive city inspector who is by turns bawling over old photos of Ember and bawling over the idea that he’s going to have to ticket the store over code violations and probably get it shut down. In his first scene, Wade personifies Elemental’s impossible-to-parse characters — somehow empathetic enough to cry over old photos, but so unfeeling that he’ll ruin his new love interest’s life just to avoid breaking a rule. It’s not great when characters’ decisions are so mystifying that you’re left to assume psychopathy.

Wade, and water people by extension are… are sensitive, I guess? Simply prone to tears? Wade is WASP-coded, in many ways, unable to handle spicy Firish food and with a family who are all comfortable, successful, and free to pursue the arts, unburdened by ethnic striving. And yet their willingness to express emotion is a very un-WASP-like quality, maybe even the defining one. (Distinct from this, Wade also has a bit of a gay vibe, despite his romantic intentions with Ember).

Earth people, meanwhile, are just sort of there. Wind People are explicated in exactly one scene, which can only be described as “Fart Basketball.” For their first date, Wade takes Ember to the big “Air Ball” game between The Windbreakers and The Cropdusters, getting involved in the Windbreakers’ famous cheer: shouting “toot toot!” with a lifted buttock. Look, I’m a sucker for any fart joke*, but even for me the connection between “Wind People”, clouds, and farting was so tenuous as to be mostly just baffling. (They should’ve had Paul Blart voice one of the fart people, that might’ve sold it).

The drama over Ember’s code violations eventually takes a backseat to a bigger issue: the mystery of why there’s a big water leak in Fire Town at all, to which the water was supposed to have been turned off years ago. High off her team’s victory at the Fartball game, Wade’s boss gives them a week to solve the mystery of the water leak before she’ll shut down the store.

Again, this mirrors Zootopia, in which Chief Bogo gives Judy Hopps 48 hours to solve Emmett Otterton’s disappearance or lose her job. That ultimatum was a lead-in to a noir plot worthy of Ray Chandler, culminating in the discovery of a corrupt politician’s scheme to destabilize predator-prey relations in the city for personal gain (the politician notably voiced by Jenny Slate, who has the most ideal cartoon voice on Earth). In Elemental, the water leak — potentially an even more direct allusion to film noir like Chinatown, which was all about water rights (and was also called “Chinatown,” like “Fire Town”) — amounts to… nothing. The entire storyline ends up being a hanging thread, totally unincorporated into the obvious interelemental love conquering all and first-generation-immigrant-makes good endings.

It’d be one thing if Elemental was a poor man’s Zootopia, which is good enough that a slightly inferior version probably wouldn’t be so bad. Elemental also doesn’t seem to understand it. It mimics the window dressing but forgets the more important stuff, like consistent characters, villains with identifiable motives, and mysteries that actually lead somewhere.

In the end, “trying to make a character out of a cloud” feels like an apt metaphor for the entire thing. It’s an amorphous mass of vapor, carried along by the wind.

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*One of my proudest moments involving aforementioned toddler was when I was pointing to pictures of animals in a book. “What’s that?” I asked. “Doggie!” he said. “That?” “Bird!” Then I pointed to a bear. “What’s that?” I asked, and he just looked at me, silently smiling. Just as I was about to ask “Bear?” he cut a huge fart and laughed his ass off. I’m not sure if I was more proud of the farting on command, the farting used for comedy, or the perfect comedic timing.