At times bordering on the nonsensical, the film feels under-developed rather than universal, a colorful missed opportunity. Set in a world where natural elements-earth, fire, water, air-coexist in a New York-style metropolis, each representing different social classes, the film-directed by Peter Sohn, from a screenplay by John Hoberh, Kat Likkel, and Brenda Hsueh-aims high with that central metaphor but is set immediately off-balance by its unwieldiness as racial allegory, an issue compounded by haphazard pacing and writing so flatly predictable it suggests a Pixar film authored by an AI algorithm. “Elemental,” Disney and Pixar’s latest, feels emblematic of the studio’s struggle to recapture its original magic, making a mess of its world-building in service of a conventional story that fails the talent of the animators involved. Also absent lately at Pixar, a subsidiary of Disney since 2006, is the mastery of execution that had distinguished the studio, a brilliance for establishing high-concept premises and effortlessly navigating their particulars. It’s not just that modern-day Pixar has focused on reprising its greatest hits with a parade of sequels (“ Toy Story 4,” “ Incredibles 2,” “ Lightyear”), or that the studio’s slate of recent originals (“ Soul,” “ Luca,” “ Turning Red”) have all, oddly enough, centered on characters transforming into animals (a revealing trope for its prevalence in films about feeling different, whose initially diverse protagonists invariably spend most of the runtime covered in fur or scales). And so it’s been dispiriting to see the animation studio behind such emotive triumphs as “ Toy Story,” “ Ratatouille,” “ Up,” and “ Inside Out”-among the best films of their respective years, bar none-recently fall short of its past standard of excellence.
At its best, Pixar is unbeatable, making clever, charming, and brightly original films to touch the heart and spark the imagination.
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