A visually polished Pixar romance with a strong immigrant-family angle and a few genuinely moving stretches, but the central love story is thinner and more predictable than the worldbuilding suggests. It’s worth watching if you’re open to a sweet, earnest crowd-pleaser that plays more like a family melodrama than a… Read more
35% ★★☆☆☆ (1,240,775)
Elemental
Where to watch: Disney
Movie · Animation · Comedy · PG
2023 · 1h 42m · ★ 35% (1.2M)
Opposites react.
Director: Peter Sohn
Starring: Leah Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Ronnie del Carmen
Overview
In a city where fire, water, land and air residents live together, a fiery young woman and a go-with-the-flow guy will discover something elemental: how much they have in common.
Director
Peter Sohn
Production
Pixar
Cast
Leah Lewis, Mamoudou Athie, Ronnie del Carmen, Shila Ommi, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Catherine O'Hara, Mason Wertheimer, Ronobir Lahiri, Wilma Bonet, Joe Pera, Matthew Yang King, Clara Lin Ding, Reagan To, Jeff Lapensee, Ben Morris, Jonathan Adams, Alex Kapp Horner, P.L. Brown
Where to watch
Disney Plus
Curator Review
Verdict
A visually polished Pixar romance with a strong immigrant-family angle and a few genuinely moving stretches, but the central love story is thinner and more predictable than the worldbuilding suggests. It’s worth watching if you’re open to a sweet, earnest crowd-pleaser that plays more like a family melodrama than a sharp social allegory.
Best for
Pixar fans looking for a softer, more romantic entry
Viewers interested in immigrant-family stories in animation
People who like colorful, high-concept worldbuilding
Families wanting an accessible emotional watch
Skip if
You want Pixar at its most inventive or emotionally devastating
You’re hoping for a fully developed social metaphor
You dislike straightforward, formula-driven romances
You prefer animation with a more subversive or adult edge
Overview
Elemental is at its best when it treats its elemental city as a lived-in immigrant neighborhood, not just a clever premise. The textures of family obligation, generational pressure, and the ache of being the child of outsiders give the film its emotional weight, and those details land more strongly than the romance does.
Worth noting
The movie is bright, polished, and easy to like, but it often rushes past the most interesting ideas in favor of a very familiar opposites-attract structure. That makes it feel less daring than Pixar’s best work, even when the craft is strong and the character design is memorable.
Bottom line
Still, there’s enough sincerity here to make it an appealing watch, especially for viewers who respond to earnestness over irony. It’s a gentle, sometimes moving family film with a few standout emotional beats, even if it doesn’t fully ignite its own premise.
Top Letterboxd reviews
zoë rose bryant (4★) · 16279 likes
watching this when you’re single is worse than being waterboarded
James (Schaffrillas) (2.5★) · 10563 likes
What the fuck was that pruning scene???
Josh (1.5★) · 7285 likes
they put “animated movie about systematic racism and familial expectations” into chat GPT and this was the result
Joe A (3★) · 3976 likes
Not as bad as Twitter or the box office would lead to believe, but still frustrating that it chooses to speed run a half baked romance instead of unpacking the one thing I thought truly worked— the immigrant story. Not to say the movie should exist without romance, but almost every other aspect was far more interesting. Hell, even the city’s apathy to an issue that endangers a whole community was something I was excited to see the movie unpack, but instead we get Wade being a goofy goober. Oh well, still prefer more of these original ideas over another Toy Story movie.
1988 · Fantasy, Animation, Family · 1h 26m · G · ★ 92% (2.3M) · Where to watch: Max
A tender family-centered fantasy that values atmosphere, wonder, and emotional simplicity.
Themes
immigration, family expectations, intercultural romance, class and community, identity and belonging, generational conflict, prejudice and assimilation, self-discovery
Topics
animation, family-friendly, romance, fantasy worldbuilding, immigrant story, coming-of-age, intercultural relationships, emotional, colorful, mainstream studio