Pixar’s Talking Blobs Are Becoming More and More Unsatisfying

On paper, Pixar’s new film, Elemental, seems like the kind of wildly inventive, visually dynamic project that has made the company such a consistent success in the animation world. The studio’s formula is clear enough: Take an inanimate, perhaps abstract thing (a toy, a car, a feeling, a human soul) and personify it, even as a talking blob of sorts, building out a representational world that nonetheless feels familiar. In Elemental, beings representing the four classical elements (earth, fire, water, and air) live in a bustling city, work humanlike jobs, and have humanlike relationships. The premise quickly expands to a recognizable metaphor of prejudice, with fire people—talking pillars of flame that struggle not to set things on fire—functioning as an oppressed underclass who strive to fit in with the other elements.

So why did Elemental just post the second-worst opening weekend in the company’s history? There are plenty of external forces to point to—reviews were tepid, and audiences have possibly grown used to waiting for Pixar movies to debut on Disney+ after that became standard practice during the pandemic (and ended with last year’s Lightyear). Still, the highest-grossing film of 2023 so far is an animated movie (Illumination’s Super Mario Bros.), indicating that families are now flocking back to theaters. And while there may be some Pixar fatigue after decades of success, all it would really take is one bona fide, critically acclaimed smash to start turning things around.

Elemental is not that smash. But why didn’t it work? The answer dawned on me pretty quickly as I paid a visit to “Element City,” the setting of Elemental, where a temperamental fire lady called Ember Lumen (voiced by Leah Lewis) falls in love with Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie), a goober of a water man. (No, I am not making these character names up.) Elemental transposes a familiar tale of immigrant struggle and perseverance onto its fantasy world—an allegory that the director, Peter Sohn, the son of Korean immigrants, has been very up front about—but does it quite predictably. The fire people are shunned by the rest of society because they are, well, on fire all the time, but Ember and Wade’s romantic connection is evidence that things can change and that fearful prejudices can be shed.

Ember’s character development has an eye-rolling triteness to it: Her salt-of-the-earth dad, Bernie (Ronnie del Carmen), is training her to run his bodega after he retires, but she realizes that she actually wants to pursue an artistic career. Ember’s fire family is loud and brassy, devouring spicy food and yelling their feelings; Wade’s water folk are presented as painfully polite, cringey liberals, prone to sobbing over every mishap (because tears are made of liquid, you see). In every sense, the metaphor is screamingly obvious, as these magical, often beautifully animated element creatures behave exactly like human beings who have jobs, file taxes, and pay bills. Much of the plot revolves around the nuances of a building inspection, hardly the stuff of a typical Disney adventure.

[Read: It’s time for Pixar to move on from Toy Story]

The issue here is similar to the baffling world building of Pixar’s Cars films, in which automobiles live in a society resembling our own despite the fact that sentient vehicles would have no need for things like stairs or stadium seating. (At least with Cars, the commercial ploy was obvious—kids like toy cars, so why not do a whole movie populated with things you could buy at the mall after you saw it?) Although Elemental has moments of imaginative joy—watching a living cloud talk to an aquatic being, for one—the viewer is mostly subjected to a very mundane, clichéd domestic dramedy, not the kind of tale that can truly transport younger audiences.

Pixar’s other biggest “blob movies” (in which the ensemble is mostly made up of abstract creations) are Inside Out and Soul, two well-received, Academy Award–winning films. In Inside Out, the colorful blob beings are emotions—Joy, Sadness, Anger—who live inside a young girl’s head, embodying her internal struggles as she navigates a painful cross-country move and the awkwardness of starting at a new school. It’s all tethered to something profoundly human, rather than a mere superficial imitation of our world. Soul is even more daring, offering up a reverse-afterlife of sorts called “The Great Before,” made up of puffy vapor people who will one day become human. Again, the blobs reveal something about humanity, even if what we’re seeing on-screen is pure make-believe.

Almost all of Pixar’s other biggest smash hits maintained some kind of connection to our human reality: What if our toys came to life? What if the monsters in our closets were real creatures just doing their job? Even the Finding Nemo films, largely undersea adventures about talking fish, took care to show how clumsily humans interact with the aquatic world. WALL-E spends its spellbinding opening act with two robots who only talk to each other, but it’s set on a future Earth, and the action eventually moves them to a spaceship filled with people. Worlds of total fantasy can succeed, but the building has to be done with extreme care; Elemental’s seems to have stopped at observations like “Fire people would have a hotter temper than water people.” I have nothing against Pixar’s blob people per se—they have proved to be just as complex as the studio’s clownfish and robots over the years. But if they return again, here’s hoping it’s in a far more relatable form.