The beauty of animation is that in that medium, literally any story can be told. To paraphrase Marty Sklar (and not Walt Disney), "If you can draw it, you can do it." And yet, animation’s versatility has in some ways led to it being pigeonholed as a way to tell the stories that specifically couldn’t be told through live-action. Fantasy stories with anthropomorphized, talking animals and magical worlds are among the most popular of these. But as digital effects allow live-action stories to create worlds like never before, it is perhaps fitting that Pixar has used animation to give us Elemental, and tell a story we routinely see in live-action, but in a way that is purely Pixar.
Ember Luman (Leah Lewis) is a fire person, a literal living flame in a world where life is made up of races based on the four classic elements of earth, air, fire and water. She’s the daughter of immigrants who left Fire Land before she was born to find a new life in Element City, a land where the four races live together, though fire people largely keep to themselves in their own neighborhood. Ember has been brought up to inherit her father’s store, though her fiery temper makes it difficult for her to wait on customers.
