Elemental at Cannes review: Pixar closes the festival with a hotly anticipated damp squib

Toy Story 3; Inside Out; Monsters, Inc. – these films are veritable masterpieces. They combined technical wizardry and phenomenal storylines that – despite being set in a toy box or inside a girl’s head, or in a monster’s universe – made absolute sense and contained their own particular logic. For Pixar, this presents a problem: anything less than shining excellence is a singular disappointment. For all Elemental’s many charms, this nonsensical film simply doesn’t cut the mustard.

Elemental is essentially a story about immigration and integration, with a love story at its heart. We meet a couple arriving in Element City from Fire Land. They first dock in an Ellis Island-esque immigration centre, where an official – who can’t understand their pronunciation – gives them their new names: Bernie and Cinder Lumen (Ronnie del Carmen and Shila Vosough). Cinder is pregnant and the couple are like Mary and Joseph, turned away by all the other elements when seeking accommodation. Though to be fair, if I were a tree, I wouldn’t want fire living in my home either.

Element City is a metropolis where the four elements coexist. Yet it is unclear exactly how they do so, fire residents scorching earth ones and so on. The city itself is an incoherent mess of high-rise buildings, train tracks, canals and roads, all of it depicted in My Little Pony hues. The fire neighbourhood is more coherently rendered and there is much fun to be had seeking out the fun details: there’s a local Pottery Burn, people wearing ‘Kiss Me, I’m Firish’ T-shirts, and lighter fluid baby formula is for sale in Bernie and Cinder’s local store. The story follows the birth of the couple’s daughter, Ember (Leah Lewis), as she grows up and prepares to take over the family store from her ailing father.

When Ember damages the business due to her explosive temper, water floods the basement and Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie) gushes into her life. Where Ember is volatile and hot-tempered, Wade is a cry baby, frequently turning on the waterworks. As their love grows, so they have to understand how to adapt to the other’s fundamental differences.

Like Inside Out, this is a film aimed at older children about to embark on relationships, while dealing with parental conflict. But said older children will also be asking themselves why fire feels cold (we see Bernie wrapping a blanket around his wife’s shoulders, which at best seems likely to put her out) and why Wade wears a shirt but not trousers, like a drippy Donald Duck. At one point, director Peter Sohn seems to take up an environmental theme, but this path is soon abandoned, in favour of a sole focus on the young couple’s troubled relationship.

Of course there are many cute moments, including a pre-pubescent tree proudly showing Ember his first armpit shoot, and the animation is, as you’d expect from Pixar, great and occasionally astounding; not to mention there’s a great score by Thomas Newman and a catchy theme. But instead of catching fire, this offering is just too much of a soggy mess.

109 mins, cert PG

In cinemas from July 7