Here is a perfectly decent, personable family entertainment from Pixar, based around another of this studio’s oddly pedantic and algorithmically developed abstract high concepts: what if fire and water fell in love? It is also a star-crossed love story based on that most traditional of American themes: melting-pot diversity in the big city.
The scene is another fabular alt-reality: Element City, a place of vivid colours and shapes like a toy held up in front of a newborn. Here, the creatures of the four elements – fire, water, earth and air – have come together to live, if not in harmony exactly, then a kind of boisterous acceptance. There is, however, a bigoted caste system that means that fire creatures are looked down on, maybe in the way the US’s northern European identities look down on people from hotter countries.
