Film Journal 2023: Elemental
Directed by Peter Sohn
The Good Dinosaur is not among my highest rated Pixar films, but to this day it remains one of my favorites. It trades the typical complexities of Pixars more legendary titles for simple storytelling, drawing out themes not through conceptual designs and intricate storytelling devices but through employjng an old fashioned narrative approach. It has been criticized for this, often occupying the lower tiers of people’s rankings. I have often argued that this is less a question of quality and more a question of expectation; i highly recommend this review for parsing out some of that complicated reality: thetwingeeks.com/2023/06/12/elemental-pixar-the-good-dinosaur-and-the-weight-of-expectations/?fbclid=IwAR2SHpiWuhjI-OgACTYmB7ojRcfbLghikKStTD3IkeGotkbiTC7xP9ze0_s
If the high concept element of the film is limited to the question, what if the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs had actually missed earth, the thematic exploration of family, belonging, adoption and growing up/coming of age in an uncertain world filled with trauma and struggle really connected for me. Given that Elemental is not only Peter Sohns follow up film but also the second film of his career, now spanning 8 years, it is fitting that this could be called a spiritual sequel of sorts. The interconnecting ideas and themes overlay both stories in a powerful way, the Good Dinosaur reaching a younger audience and Elemental reaching an older one given the ages and experiences of their main characters.
It will be interesting to see how far Elemental’s reach will be when it comes to finding its target audience. It’s worth repeating that the film does veer older, with its subject matter dealing with the relationship between a younger adolescent and her relationship to her father. It is a perfect fit for fathers day, and I think it serves best speaking to either the parents in the crowd grappling with their relationship with a son/daughter, or the 16-21 year old crowd grappling with issues surrounding what it means to be an adult in a confusing and often difficult world.
In all honesty, the two films function really well as a double feature, both capturing the different phases of growing up and living the grown up life. They ask similar questions, and yet pose them from slightly different vantage points. What made the Good Dinosaur especially meaningful to me is that it came out the year that we adopted our then 12 year old son. The way it tackles the idea of found family and the idea of family being bigger than blood proved a powerful complement to our own experience of becoming a family 8 years ago. Elemental, in contrast, begins with the larger theme of immigration, following a family as they move from one country to another in efforts to begin anew. This cross cultural context, although different than our own, adds something to my personal experience with this film, as we adopted our son from Ukraine, traveling to unfamiliar territory to find him and he coming to this completely unfamiliar country called Canada after the family became official.
The story that we find in Elemental is actually deceptively rich. I have heard of some writing it off already simply on the basis of the trailer naming the main character, a fire Elemental, “Ember”. Yes, the metaphor at play is on the nose, all the way down to Ember having a firey temper given to fits of rage and her eventual encounter with water characters who are in touch with their feelings and prone to being a sobbing mess. The available puns that come from this make no efforts to hide themselves. But the world the film builds around this metaphor is endlessly interesting and unquestionably beautiful. The story even more so. I loved how the layers of the narrative form these progressively narrowing circles of plot lines and thematic focus, taking the broader context of the immigration story and playing that first in to the developing romance between the two polarized elementals, and then narrower yet into the internal struggle of Ember. The glue that binds these things together is the family dynamic, taking these ever narrowing circles and broadening it back out again into the films intergenerational dynamics, exploring how it is that the relationship between parent and child reflect these cyclical patterns and realities, some that hold us hostage and others that promise liberation. It’s in this sense that the film affords the two sides of its experiences, parent and adolescent, a proper entry point into the story.
For many of us who know what it is to be both, I would imagine the story might resonate on both sides of that metaphorical fence. I know it did for me, hitting on some heavy trigger points when it comes to my own grappling with these given realities and experiences. Perhaps most apparent is that deep rooted fear that my son hears much of the same messaging as Ember hears from her own father, and knowing how to communicate what I would really would want him to hear feels like an impossibility sometimes, even on our best days. That feeling of being misunderstood, and of misunderstanding, looms large in this story, with past regrets and failures lingering in the background of it’s own pertinent efforts to face these truths head on.
One last thing. I get that this film is not technically perfect (no film is). There is a degree to which it might be stretching itself too broadly in terms of its themes. For a surface level metaphor it is juggling quite a bit, and there is a chance someone might latch on to one element of the interconnected storylines and miss the rest. That’s the danger of trying to bring two sides of the audience in to the same story. You might end up spending so much time trying to find yourself in this story that you miss the other perspective. And the more subtext the film brings in the more likely that is. On that same note, I actually really liked what they did with the developing love story between the two young adults. It reminded me of the similarly lovely and immersive romance sequence in the live action The Little Mermaid. It’s a good example of how, at its strongest, this film is able to take those particulars and spin them as universals, with the romance bleeding necessary nuance into the other plot lines as they develop alongside it. If nothing else, the two sides of the conversation affords exactly that- important conversations across generational lines.
I do know that, without question, I personally am deeply appreciative of this film. Even more so of the Director. The stories he wants to tell, or that he feels he needs to tell, are stories that have deeply impacted my own life and grown my understanding of this world and my experiences of it. I would trade technical veracity for this type of grounded and accessible and personally invested storytelling any day, even with its imperfections.
The Stories of my Life 