Element City: Families come here to build new lives, raise their children, fulfill their wildest dreams. It’s the one place where every element peacefully coexists in harmony.
Except fire, that is. And Ember Lumen is sick of it.
Ember’s parents were the first Fire people to migrate to Element City. Since then, they’ve helped establish an entire community, providing food, toys and wisdom through their shop, the Fireplace.
Bernie, Ember’s dad, wants to retire and give the shop to Ember. But he won’t do it until she can control her purple-hot temper.
Only, that’s really hard when there’s so much to be upset about. Element City wasn’t designed with Fire people in mind. So Ember can’t even leave Firetown without accidentally burning the leaves off Earth people or boiling Water people to the point of evaporation. And even in her own neighborhood, she has to carry around an umbrella to protect her from water spilling over from Element City’s transportation canals.
Still, Ember’s determined to prove she can keep her cool and run the shop.
But when Wade Ripple, a Water person who works for the city’s building code office, accidentally bursts through the Fireplace’s pipes, elements clash.
Wade immediately cites the Fireplace for a number of code violations—not that he wants to, mind you, it’s just his job. But after seeing Ember’s fiery passion, he agrees to help her save the Fireplace from being shut down by the city.
Pretty soon, Wade shows Ember all that Element City has to offer. And she realizes that despite prejudices held by even her own parents, there just might be a way for elements to mix.
Ember is incredibly loyal to her family and her community. She’s grateful to her parents for leaving their home in order to build a better life for her in the city. And she considers it an honor to sacrifice her own desires for the needs of her family.
Unfortunately, this loyalty makes Ember feel guilty when she begins to fall for Wade. She’s been told her entire life that “elements don’t mix.” And she worries that if she pursues a future with Wade (or a future outside her family’s shop), it’ll break her father’s heart.
However, as the film progresses, Wade helps Ember to embrace the idea that she should be honest with her parents instead of suffering in silence. Ember’s parents came to Element City for her, not for the shop. And while they would love for her to stay with them and run the shop, what they really want is for Ember to be happy.
Wade and his family just might be the most sympathetic people ever. They constantly shed tears of sorrow and joy for the misfortunes and jubilations of others. They’re also incredibly kind, constantly helping others. (Wade uses his empathic abilities to rally an entire stadium of angry sports fans into cheering for a slumping player whose mother is sick.)
That said, Wade still struggles to understand why Ember feels guilty pursuing her own dreams. But when the time comes, Wade chooses to make a sacrifice of his own, proving that he does understand the value of what Ember’s parents have done for her.
At several critical points in the story, we see characters risk their lives to help others.
Apart from individual characters’ redemptive moments, the story clearly hopes to be a catalyst for a deeper examination of the intertwined subjects of racism and immigration. We see classic immigration tropes, such as an official at an Ellis Island-like receiving station who is unable to spell Bernie and Cinder’s real names, and who then unilaterally changes them. We also see Bernie and Cinder struggle to find housing, with folks slamming doors in their faces without even speaking to them.
Throughout the early part of the film, especially, we see how racial prejudice is at work against the Fire people. For instance, someone assumes Ember grew up speaking the Fire language and inadvertently insults her when he says how well she speaks the common tongue (not realizing she grew up speaking it just like him).
Those aren’t positive things, obviously. The racism that Ember and her family experience is a hard thing for them. But the film itself obviously strives to spotlight how poorly immigrants are sometimes treated and the prejudice they must overcome, which is a redemptive theme.
Ember’s family protects a mystical Blue Flame that Bernie brought with them from Fireland, where he was born. He tells Ember that it holds “all their traditions” and helps them to “burn bright.” And their family often prays to it.
Cinder, Ember’s mom, acts as a sort of fortune teller for romance. She makes couples light wooden sticks and then “reads” the smoke to find out if they’re destined to be. She also appears to be able to smell love on a person.
Ember mentions an “act of God.”
Wade’s sister (who is reported to identify as nonbinary) is gay and sits next to her girlfriend at a family dinner. There appear to be other same-sex couples in some scenes who dance and kiss, but it’s difficult to say for certain since these aren’t human characters and because their screen time is typically very brief.
Two Earth people (who look like apple trees) pick each other’s fruit. When someone spots them through an open window, they get embarrassed and say they’re just “pruning.” Later, a couple jokes about whether there will be any “pruning” on their date. A married couple talks about “hanky panky.”
Several couples smooch. Ember is irritated when a guy calls her “hot,” not realizing he meant her temperature, not her appearance.
As mentioned, Ember and Wade gradually kindle an unlikely romance and learn to navigate their “elemental” differences.
Several Water people are accidentally boiled by the heat of a Fire person. One Water guy actually evaporates (though he’s later able to recondense, reviving him). A few Earth people have their leaves burned off by fire, as well. Two Water boys try to make a Fire girl fall into water, asking if she’ll die if she does. (Though it doesn’t appear the boys would have succeeded, their father stops them and embarrassedly apologizes.)
Many Fire people are injured when water hits their various limbs. (Though a few chomps of a fire stick restore their flames.) The entire Fire community flees a flash flood, though it appears none are permanently harmed.
A storm causes significant damage to an island community. An elderly Fire woman passes away in a poof of smoke. People talk about a butterfly getting crushed by a windshield wiper. Ember causes substantial property damage in a few scenes when she literally explodes after losing her temper.
An Earth boy who grows flowers from his armpits often picks these blooms (to his own pain) to gift to girls. A boy hits his uncle with a bat. A man’s hand is accidentally slammed in a door.
None, but the words “ash” and “fluffing” are substituted for profanities in two scenes. Someone utters the incomplete phrase, “What the—?” We also hear a few uses of “dang” and one “holy dewdrop.”
None, but clips in the credits show Ember’s mom with a cocktail.
As noted above, racism in the context of immigration is a big theme here, and we definitely see various characters treated poorly because of their race. Sometimes, they hurl element-based insults at each other.
And those prejudices go both directions, too. Bernie, for example, makes it very clear how much he hates Water people, even going as far as saying they all look alike (yet another racist trope). And when Ember’s grandmother dies, she makes Ember promise to marry a Fire person.
Some Water kids purposely ruin objects for sale in the Fireplace. A Fire customer repeatedly tries to exploit a “Buy one, get one free” sale. Ember loses her temper with multiple customers at the Fireplace. Characters lie. Sports fans insult players and the referee when a game doesn’t go their way. (And the team involved is called the Windbreakers, with their team slogan being “Toot, toot!”) A woman repeatedly tries to sneak past a security guard.
We hear that Bernie’s dad didn’t give Bernie his blessing when Bernie and Cinder went to Element City to build a new life. Wade says he clashed with his dad and never got the chance to make things right before his dad died.
Pixar has long been touted as a company that makes children’s films. However, recent years have shown a drift towards more grown-up themes and storylines. Elemental flows in that stream.
Ember is a Fire girl who always thought she’d grow up to run her family’s shop in Firetown. But after she meets Wade, she realizes she has other dreams and ambitions.
The couple has more than just familial expectations to overcome. “Elements don’t mix,” they’re told. And as a Water guy, Wade represents everything that Ember’s dad hates about Element City’s prejudice against Fire people.
But through empathy, determination, perseverance and love, the couple finds a way not only to save Ember’s family’s store, but to build a new Element City—one that nurtures healthy elemental relations and fosters a thriving community.
Those are terrific, redemptive messages that potentially give families a lot to discuss.
But as we’ve seen so regularly from Disney and Pixar the last few years, families also have visual and verbal references to same-sex couples to contend with as well. And while there’s no crude language, we do hear a couple of substitutions for harsher profanities and some innuendo as well.
These elements, plus the film’s romcom plot, might make Elemental too mature for younger viewers. But the themes we see here are still in line with what Pixar’s been doing for a while now, both in positive ways and in ways that may give some families pause.
Emily studied film and writing when she was in college. And when she isn’t being way too competitive while playing board games, she enjoys food, sleep, and geeking out with her husband indulging in their “nerdoms,” which is the collective fan cultures of everything they love, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate and Lord of the Rings.
