Elemental (2023)

For the discussion of the PIXAR film coming in 2023.

While we wait for DVDizzy, I found an interesting article from The Guardian (which is really about Skyndance's Luck):

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/aug/02/all-work-and-no-play-why-the-cartoon-world-needs-to-stop-copying-the-corporate

Quote :

In 2022, the contrast between the ethereal and the boringly bureaucratic is as much of a cartoon cliche as zany talking animals. Take a mysterious, metaphysical concept, add a crowd of bean-counters and pen-pushers, and you’ve got yourself a film.

Ever wanted to know what goes on inside a beehive, an arcade game or the internet? Bee Movie, Wreck-It Ralph and The Emoji Movie agree that they’re full of wage slaves doing their nine-to-five jobs.

If any one person is behind this trend, it’s Pete Docter, who directed Monsters, Inc., Inside Out, and Soul, and who helped define what a Pixar cartoon could be. (It can’t be a coincidence that Luck is the first film from Skydance Animation – and that the studio’s head of animation is Pixar’s former supremo, John Lasseter.) Docter’s own cartoons come across as sincere attempts to be truthful about abstruse philosophical conundrums. But in most of the films directed by his imitators, all the talk of quotas and promotions and performance reviews seems like a lazy gimmick, and a pretty depressing one at that. As charming as these cartoons can be, their underlying message is that the best way to facilitate anything – birth, death, joy, Christmas presents – is to have hordes of diligent employees devoting themselves to one monolithic company.

You can see why that message might appeal to executives at Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks and Skydance, but I hope the trend is coming to an end. I’m not feeling lucky, though. Pixar’s 2023 release, Elemental, is set “in a city where fire, water, land, and air residents live together”. Don’t be surprised if there are filing cabinets in there somewhere.

The author sounds a little harsh, but he does have a point. As always, one should probably wait and see what the concept of Elemental really is. So far very little has revealed. Still, if it has some similarities to those examples mentioned in the article, we could have different elementals doing different jobs; "OK, the temperature on the ground has reached a certain level, we need you to go out there and do your job as a flame. And Water, there will be raining over New York in five minutes, you know what to do".

(The author also forgot to mention the fairy movies, which I think use the same kind of ideas)

"If any one person is responsible"--I think that person would be John Lasseter. Clearly the author doesn't follow studio politics beyond the 3 minutes before they started writing this article.

I agree though in hoping it's coming to an end. Things looked up with Luca and Turning Red, which made me interested in PIXAR for the first time in what they were putting out in decades now. Hopefully Elemental is only a very BRIEF return to that horrible, tired formula. It looks very unappetizing, that's for sure.

Yes, there is a reason why Disney and Pixar started looking like each other during the Lasseter era (both Finding Nemo and Wreck-It Ralph has support meetings for villains, just to name one example), and Lasseter's first movie after Pixar use the same concept. Even if it can't be denied that Docter has used the corporation thing once or twice himself.

Sadly Luca and Turning Red were never released in the theaters, so we can't say how newer ideas at the studio regarding plot and animation style would have been welcomed by the audience. But everything that goes beyond tried formulas should be encouraged.