Elemental Criticism: Visually gorgeous, but overloaded with cloying sentimentality

What went wrong at Pixar? This is the innovative animation studio that eclipsed everything in the first decade of this millennium that invented a way to use the graphic look of digital animation to its advantage in the groundbreaking film Toy Story that was willing starting a movie with a 20-minute dialogue-free scene in Wall-E - and finding out kids didn't care - and doing an adventure movie with a 78-year-old hero in Up! would do. Kids didn't care either, it turns out, because Carl Fredricksen was a grumpy grandfather adventurer who didn't care what other people thought of him either. Pixar always had something new up its sleeve. And yet they now come up with a movie as silly and cloying as "Elemental."The title suggests the kids will get a head start on the periodic table, which apparently was director Peter Sohn's first idea, but no. The elements in "Elemental," which closed tonight's Cannes Film Festival, are now the ancient Greek elements: fire, water, air and earth. A candy-colored version of New York, Element City is a water-rich city filled with canals, drains and dams; its inhabitants include earthmen with flowers under their armpits and airmen floating like clouds. The dominant liquid inhabitants are shaped like balloons, nimble humanoid aquatic beings that can disintegrate into their natural element under pressure and then emerge fully reconstituted down the drains. This is how Wade Ripple, the city water works inspector, gets into the store of an elderly fire couple and meets Ember, their spraying daughter.Fire people are dangerous creatures. Aquarians, afraid of being turned to steam, ban them from public buildings. Common folk regularly tell them to go back to where they came from, which is Fireland. Ember's family are immigrants who came to Element City from Fireland after storms devastated their hometown. "It was the only way to create a better life... it was the last time your father saw his family," says Ember's mother, her eyes shut tight, though her smoky eyes can't cry.The fire people, who are hardly tolerated, prefer to keep to themselves. Living across the river from the city, they avoid taking trains where they could inadvertently burn Earthmen's leafy hair to ash or get drenched with water from the overhead aqueducts. "The town isn't made for firemen," Ember says as she embarks on a delivery run for her father's store, which sells the kind of chili balls that firemen love to eat. "It would take an act of God to get me across that bridge... all I need is here." That all changes, however, when she meets Wade, a see-through sausage of wet love who cries at almost everything and genuinely likes Ember even though he can't touch her.Wade takes them downtown, where they take in the view from a very tall building - yes, the Empire State Building - and then go to the movies. "Tide and Prejudice" is shown. There are some such visual jokes, the usual game of "find the details" for the adults watching family movies; you can count on Pixar's geniuses to come up with countless whimsical details. Let's not underestimate that. There are also some wild explosions, especially when Ember gets angry. There are sensational floods and a colorfully designed football game between aggressive clouds. There just isn't a line or situation that would make you laugh out loud. Not even if you were four years old.Nobody knows anything, as William Goldman said. It's true that kids were happy to see a movie about the friendship of a tin can with a steering wheel in Wall-E, which previously seemed unlikely. Still, I'm confident they'll find the cheesy romance between the unlikely Ember and Wade just gross. Because she is."Elemental," a film that starts with a clever concept and builds a world of inventiveness - exactly what we've come to expect from Pixar - then uses that world as the backdrop for a drawn-out will-she-don't-want-her flirtation , which could have been ripped from a telenovela screenplay. I know kids these days know the ways of the world, but that's exactly what gets them embarrassed, especially when it culminates in a big sticky fire-water kiss and their parents are in the room.There are also boring passages. I wonder if young audiences will take the opportunity offered to learn more about the role of water pressure in a canal system that has personally lost me. Perhaps the romance is aimed at girls while the engineering snippets are offered as consolation to boys? This sort of gender stereotyping should be long overdue, but we know it still works and there are, after all, pesky (and currently difficult) market guidelines to follow.Then there's the oft-repeated wisdom about hardworking immigrants and moments when we see just how cruel racists are, signaling a dignified message of inclusivity with all the subtlety of a pipe about to burst under the sink. Smug moralizing is a consistent element of family entertainment, admittedly. Again, kids won't care, but seeing the genuinely heartbreaking experiences of refugees getting smothered in more icing layered on top of the core romance might overwhelm even the most well-meaning, enlightened adults. "Elemental" could actually have been called just "Sentimental". That would have saved time.

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