"Elemental" is the most emotional Pixar movie since "Inside Out," and the hardest to make sense of.
It's a full-on romance, set in a world where characters belong to one of four groups that pretty much stick to themselves: fire, water, earth and air. Main characters Ember (fire) and Wade (water) fall in love — "When I met you, I thought I was drowning, but that light inside you has made me so alive," is how Wade puts it. Voice actors Leah Lewis and Mamoudou Athie, respectively, bring huge depths of feeling to their performances as a couple whose communities — especially Ember's traditional parents — don't approve.
Pixar has sometimes been shy about love stories, but that's the part of "Elemental" that works best. That has a lot to do with director Peter Sohn's willingness to commit to the central romance, which has humor but gets into pretty dark emotional territory for both of its unmoored main characters, whose parents are not wrong when they point out the tremendous differences between them.
