An anthropomorphic immigrant romance combines into a mixed metaphorical mess.

Welcome to Element City… which might make sense if all the elemental creatures founded it at the same time. Instead, a pair of Fire immigrants arrive to find themselves unwelcome before discovering an abandoned building and opening a convenience store called The Fireplace. Years later, father Bernie (Ronnie Del Carmen) is intent to retire and have his daughter Ember (Leah Lewis) take over, but her temperamental attitude toward needy customers needs work. When she accidentally destroys the store’s basement piping in a tantrum, a city inspector named Wade (Mamoudou Athie) cites the establishment with multiple violations threatening to shut the business down within a week. Desperate to save her father’s dream, Ember reluctantly works with Wade to cover up her mistake and fix the source of the problem, but spending time with a water elemental gives her a new perspective while wackiness ensues and romantics entangle.

Director Peter Sohn previously made The Good Dinosaur for Pixar — a film best known for being immediately forgettable — but he was also responsible for the better-received Pixar short Partly Cloudy, which certainly informs his newest film. As the son of New York immigrants, the inspirational parallels are obvious, from the apprehension of making the journey to a strange land, carving out a fulfilling life, and passing those advantages on to their children. The world idea sounds eerily similar to Disney’s Zootopia, with animals instead of elements in a shared metropolis, but while that film primarily dealt with the irrational fear of assumed intentions, the core relationship remained perfectly plutonic rather than romantic throughout. With young adult ideas and storybook animation, what elements will audiences connect with, if any at all?

In the film’s beginning, our immigrant protagonists are treated as semi-welcome second-class citizens, even receiving “easier for others” names they accept as part of their new life, settling in an empty part of town after being refused entry anywhere. This struggle felt very real… before being almost entirely abandoned as backstory once Ember is introduced; this story bait-and-switch infamously derailed the potential of WALL-E when reintroduced humans highjacked the narrative mid-film. As Wade and Ember begin trench bonding, the film seems more intent upon clever sight gags than making sense, hoping the rapid fire nonsense will gloss over the lack of cohesion. The character of Clod voiced by Mason Wertheimer serves exactly no purpose other than a speed bump to pad the runtime, just one example of a lot of wasted time. It’s unusual to see a Pixar film built on “plussing” instead of being enhanced by it, failing to live up to better thought-out animated fare like the aforementioned Zootopia and or Illumination’s surprisingly well-rounded Sing films.

By way of example, Element City sits at the presumable edge of an ocean, but is it made out of Water folks? The city is constructed from wood, metal, and glass, all things that sentient Earth elements are made of but without ever being addressed. Sure, it’s a fantasy world with literal fantasy elements, but whenever real-world chemistry enters into the plot — sublimation or combustion, for example — the film pats itself on the back for being clever and innovative for using or not using it, whatever serves the script in the moment. Whether it’s science-fiction or fantasy magic, there must be rules, and every other Pixar film seems to grasp this, especially when providing reasons such rules are occasionally broken. Besides going away from the story of Bernie and Cinder, the “forbidden” romance between Ember and Wade makes the entire film feel like a pilot to a Disney+ series rather than a complete story, and it can’t help but ring hollow no matter how compelling the visuals are.

Elemental steadily gained an audience after an initial disappointing release, not unlike the rise of Encanto once people finally watched it streaming; this happened because it was allowed to languish in theaters with little or no competition. While it could have been so much more, it does serve as an example of being given the chance to find its audience. Maybe other studios could learn something from that instead purging art from existence and writing it off at tax time.

Elemental is rated PG for some peril, thematic elements, brief language, and not having a Charlton Heston-looking character shouting “The water supply is made out of people!”

Two skull recommendation out of four