“Elemental” review: “Elemental” is a kind of “Romeo and Juliet” riff featuring the forbidden love between two elements that never easily mix: fire and water.
Katie Walsh and Tribune News ServiceThank you for supporting our journalism. This article is available exclusively for our subscribers, who help fund our work at the Chicago Tribune.Brook Ripple, right, is very welcoming to Ember when her son Wade brings the Fire girl home to a Water family dinner.
It’s fairly rare that beloved animation studio Pixar makes a straightforward romantic movie — the films they produce frequently focus on family love and friendship love, but it’s not often to see a swooning love story between two individuals as we do in Peter Sohn’s “Elemental,” a kind of “Romeo and Juliet” riff featuring the forbidden love between two elements that never easily mix: fire and water.
“Elemental” is also an immigrant story, about a family forced to leave one homeland to seek a new life in a strange new place. A pre-title sequence follows Bernie and Cinder as they arrive in Elemental City from their home in Fireland. Though the water, earth, air and fire elements share a complicated coexistence in this bustling metropolis, Bernie and Cinder don’t find warm hospitality there.
Sohn and screenwriters John Hoberg, Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh are working well-known, much-beloved stories and tropes, transposing these tales into this fantastical world of humanoid elements.
But this modern kind of love proves irresistible. It’s a refreshing update to Shakespeare’s hormonal teens, and the proud, barrel-chested Disney princes of yore. Voiced with a unique tenderness by Athie, what makes Wade lovable is his kindness, his vulnerability, his willingness to share his emotions and his delight in all of Ember’s distinctly fiery qualities.
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