‘Elemental’ Reviews Roundup: Critics Are Hot And Cold On Pixar’s Latest

When Pixar’s Elemental premiered at Cannes, the trades were full of gloom and doom takes predicting another flop from the house that Toy Story built. Early reviews were unenthusiastic and box office prognosticators predicted the film will struggle in a crowded June calendar.

That will likely end up being the case, but there seems to be more to this story than initial reactions shared from the French Riviera indicated. If we look at the film’s Rotten Tomatoes critical score, we can see that when all critics’ reviews are tabulated, director Peter Sohn’s film scored a good-not-great 75% – coincidentally the same score his last feature The Good Dinosaur received.

When just top critic reviews are considered, many of which were posted weeks ago, that score drops to 62%. That’s a huge disconnect and perhaps indicates that Disney made a big mistake when deciding to debut the film at Cannes. Sure, a Cannes screening adds some gravitas to any film’s resume, but if the highbrow crowd at the world’s most prestigious festival rejects a movie that is meant for the broadest audience possible, that might have a major impact on the film’s commercial prospects.

For our Elemental Reviews Roundup, we decided to only include critiques that were published this week, rather than those which came out last month after the film’s Cannes premiere. We feel this will lead to a perspective that is more in line with our readership and the film’s intended audience. From the newer batch of reviews, there is a consensus that the film is visually stunning. In terms of story and entertainment, however, most seem to think it’s just good-not-great. Still, reactions are trending in a positive direction after a flat Cannes premiere.

Elemental is set in the New York City-inspired Element City, where fire-,water-, land- and air-residents live together. The film is a romantic comedy featuring Ember Lumen, a fiery young woman, and Wade Ripple, a go-with-the-flow type of guy. Their blossoming relationship challenges the couple’s beliefs about the world they live in.

Here’s what the critics are saying about Peter Sohn’s Elemental, in theaters today.

Brian Lowry at CNN enjoyed the film, but wouldn’t rate it among the studio’s best:

Pixar set the bar so high for itself in that dizzying stretch of early hits that a rougher patch was perhaps inevitable, and the .500 batting average of its last half-dozen movies has brought the company back down to Earth. Elemental doesn’t quite join the studio’s hallowed top tier, but it does yield moments of magic and beauty – reflecting both the immigrant experience as well as the power of love – worthy of that legacy. [W]atching fire and water come together, as portrayed here, it’s hard not to come away feeling a little bit misty.

Writing for AV Club, Manuel Betancourt praised the film’s innovative visuals, but argues its story doesn’t live up to those standards:

There’s visual inventiveness in how fire, water, earth, and wind characters move through the city (even if I continued to wonder how some water is sentient and other water isn’t). In fact, some of the best gags in the film come from the playful way in which Element City is portrayed by Sohn’s animation team… Even with the sheer artistry at work in seeing Wade and Ember interact with one another, Elemental never quite finds a similarly entrancing story beats to match. For every painstakingly explained bit of subplot (a blue flame that’s been in the Lumens family but is also maybe part of their heritage back home?) there is an equally underdeveloped slice of story (who knew failing infrastructure would be the ultimate villain of this piece?).

Echoing a similar sentiment that came up time and again in the reviews we read, Katie Walsh at the Los Angeles Times wrote:

Accepting that the story beats are overly familiar is a bargain one makes with the filmmakers in order to enjoy the visually dazzling world of Elemental. One has to wonder if the concept for the film came about because the Pixar animators wanted a chance to demonstrate their aptitude with such challenging substances as fire and water. The characters’ surfaces are constantly moving: faces of flame flicker and crackle with the grace of a watercolor painting; bubbles float and churn and pop through the bodies of the watery folk, held together with a tenuous viscosity. It’s a truly eye-popping and detailed expression of animation technology and technique. The environments of Element City are vibrantly rendered, especially Firetown, a vague melange of Asian, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern influences, which are reflected in Thomas Newman’s score.

In her less-than-glowing review for The New York Times, Amy Nicholson wrote:

Elemental is the latest Pixar premise to feel like someone laced the cafeteria’s kombucha keg with ayahuasca. Starting eight years ago with Inside Out, the animation company has transformed cartoons into a form of group therapy that encourages audiences to ruminate on inner peace, death (Coco), and resurrection (Soul). This story is simpler (elemental, even). It’s a girl-meets-boy cross-cultural romantic comedy — a good one that woos us to root for the big kiss. But the Pixar-brand psychotropic flourish comes from which cultures. Here, they are water, earth, air, and fire — the four classical elements that the ancient philosopher Empedocles used to explain our world — all tenuously coexisting in Element City, a Manhattan analog founded by the first droplet to ooze out of the primordial sea…

Elemental seems like a stunt from a company running dry on ideas. Perhaps that’s partially true. Yet, it’s in the tradition of mankind’s long history looking to water, earth, air, and fire to understand itself. Only, please, nobody tell Pixar that Aristotle added a fifth element, ether, which physicists interpret as dark matter or the void. My brain can’t handle a sequel.

Vulture’s Alison Willmore seemed to encapsulate the general feeling among critics that the film looks great but lacks other virtues that make for good cinema. Comparing Sohn’s latest to his previous film The Good Dinosaur, she said:

Elemental is the second feature from Peter Sohn, a Pixar stalwart who has been with the company since 2000 but as a director is now 0 for 2. The movie looks good — Element City teems with imaginative details about how its varied residents navigate life in close proximity — but its undercooked concept is a problem. The alternate-history premise of Sohn’s 2015 debut, The Good Dinosaur, also felt like it needed a few more passes, but it was set in a world dominated by dinosaurs that never went extinct, so the stakes felt lower. While Sohn has said Elemental was inspired by his parents, his upbringing in multicultural New York City, and his own mixed marriage, the lack of deeper consideration his film gives to its ideas leads to some ugly reductiveness.