Hacker Cinema
Elemental
2023 · Film · 102 min
Directed by Peter Sohn
In a city where fire, water, land and air residents live together, a fiery young woman and a go-with-the-flow guy will discover something elemental: how much they have in common.
5 positive5 negative11 neutralfrom 21 commenters
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24 comments on Hacker News
Just saying "Pixar movies" was probably not a great example. They can be deliberately location ambiguous (Monsters Inc., Toy Story - though it's clearly _somewhere_ in America, The Incredibles - a generic "metropolis"/50's futuristic city, lightyear, Elemental) or very specifically somewhere (cars - mashup of Route 66 towns, Finding Nemo - Sydney when on land, Ratatouille - Paris, etc...)
It makes sense to "translate" locale cultural indicators in say Wall·E which was very location agnostic but not so much for say Turning red which is very culturally specific.
A couple things:
1. The academy has had a significant increase of young voters in the past 10 years or so. Generally speaking, young voters are more likely to take animation as a "serious" medium.
2. These interviews were always somewhat overstated. Of course some voters have stupid rationales, but I don't think this dominates the academy.
3. Disney's Inside Out 2 was nowhere close to winning the award this year - Flow's biggest competition was The Wild Robot, which did gross far more than Inside Out 2, but far below Inside Out 2.
If you look at the past couple years, The Boy and the Heron (Studio Ghibli) won over Across the Spider-Verse (with Pixar's movie Elemental nowhere close) in 2023, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio won over Across the Spider-Verse (with Pixar's movie Turning Red nowhere close) in 2022, etc.
I'm curious what year you're thinking about above. Perhaps Toy Story 4 over Klaus in 2019?
> The last 5 Pixar films are all flops, and all signs point to leadership at Disney interfering with the creative process.
4 were flops in the sense that their theatrical releases did not cover their budgets, but only 1 of those (Lightyear) was because audiences didn't want to see it (and so could be blamed on the creative process).
The other 3 did not cover their budgets with their theatrical releases because they didn't have domestic theater releases (other than very short runs in a handful of theaters probably to preserve eligibility for awards) and their foreign releases were in a much smaller number of countries than other Pixar movies.
Domestically, and in countries that had Disney+, they went straight to streaming.
In reverse order:
• Elemental made nearly $500 million in its theatrical run. In no universe can that be considered to be a flop.
• Turning Red did not have a domestic theatrical release, and a fairly limited foreign release. It was only in Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.
In those countries in which both Turning Red and Toy Story 4 (the last Pixar movie before COVID started tanking box office) Turning Red earned about half of what Toy Story 4 did.
If we assume that ratio would have been similar in the countries Toy Story 4 was in that did not get Turning Red (Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela) we get that Turning Red should have made around $420 million.
It was the second most watched streaming film of 2022.
• Similar for Luca. It's theatrical release was Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Türkiye, Ukraine, and United Arab Emirates.
In those countries that had both Luca and Toy Story 4, Luca earned $39 million and Toy Story 4 earned $70 million. That extrapolates to a full theatrical release for Luca would have been around $560 million.
It was the most watched streaming film of 2021.
• Soul's theatrical release was Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Lithuania, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia/CIS, Saudi Arabia, Serbia and Montenegro, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.
I don't have the Toy Story 4 comparison for that one, but its total foreign box office was about 2.4x that of Luca, suggesting that had it gotten a full theatrical release it would have have done quite a bit north of $600 million.
Soul's release timing made it so its peak streaming straddled the year boundary so it didn't get near top spots on yearly streaming lists but was on top of weekly or monthly lists at the end of 2020 and start of 2021.
They were flops even if they made money because their expectations were so infinitely sky-high.
Force Awakens? Everyone who had ever seen Star Wars went to see it (extended family had a tradition of seeing Star Wars movies when they came out). Later ones didn’t have that, and we’ve never seen the last one.
Elemental obviously outperformed expectations but was no Toy Story. Wish is not doing well and looks unlikely to recover.
We’re long gone from the era of every single Disney (or Pixar) animated film being an absolute instant classic and powerhouse.
(Part of this may be the huge number of live action remakes - even if financially successful they seem entirely forgettable).
To elaborate on some of the items others have mention, here are head counts for Pixar's most recent film, Elemental, based on the credits on IMDB:
1 director 3 writers 20 voice actors 5 producers 1 music composer 2 cinematographers 12 editing 5 casting 1 production designer 2 art directors 2 production managers 14 art department 42 sound department 85 visual effects 68 animation 46 music 1 continuity 77 additional crew That's 387 people. These kinds of movies take years to produce (7 for Elemental), although not everyone works on them full time during the full length of production.
> Now it’s just more Disney nonsense, the soul has been lost.
Did you see any of them? Soul is probably their best movie; Luca and Turning Red were great. Onward was surprisingly good. Elemental was a new genre for them, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was still really good.
I didn’t see Lightyear, but this is also the Pixar that did Cars 2 and The Good Dinosaur, so it’s not like every movie knocked it out of the park.
I think the target audience is kids and their parents. As a parent of young children, I really enjoyed both Turning Red and Elemental, as did my kids.
It isn't easy to make movies that kids like and want to watch but parents don't mind watching multiple times (because that's how kids do movies... multiple times)
Disney still does a pretty good job of that.
I thought Elemental and Turning Red were very well done story wise (Romeo/Juliet, teen angst), they are worth multiple watches on Disney+. Encanto (Disney, but not Pixar) was brilliant, it is too bad it didn't get the theater release it deserved because of COVID.
I get not being in the audience for a film. I felt like that about all the Star Wars prequels, and I spent my pre-10s on the original trilogy. I couldn't tell you what is wrong about sequels, even if they were done well I probably wouldn't be in the audience for them anymore.
Profitability is the new target in 2024. Not losing so much money on useless underperforming movies. Let's go through the recent Pixar flops in the years before since 2020.
Onward (2020) - Budget: $200 million - Box Office: $142 million (Loss) Soul (2020) - Budget: $150 million - Box Office: $121 million (Loss) Luca (2021) - Budget: >$100+ million - Box Office: $49.8 million (Loss) Turning Red (2022) - Budget: $175 million - Box Office: $20.1 million (Loss) Lightyear (2022) - Budget: $200 million - Box Office: $226.4 million (Tiny profit) Apart from Elemental (2023) which was highly successful, there seems to be a string of more box office failures from Pixar recently and it being turned into a high cost factory. Disney saw the same and decided to let 20% from Pixar go.
> I want escapism
I mean going by the highest grossing movies of the year you got plenty to choose from. Other than barbie (which I would argue is not super deep in terms of politics anyway) the rest are all escapism: Super Mario Bros, Fast and furios 10, guardians of the galaxy 3, spiderverse 2, mission impossible, quantumania, little mermaid and elemental are all extremely light in terms of politics.
The three movies with "heaviest" political message are oppenheimer, barbie and even then in case of oppie the message is "mcarthyanism was paranoid and political engagement was stiffled as well as weaponised for personal and selfish goals" certainly not a super crazy political opinion that america's red scare went too far. And in terms of Barbie its mostly surface level "its not easy to be a woman" and capitalism takes advantage of people. But saying "self actualisation is hard with economic forces pushing against you, and some parts of the patriarchy have a compounding effect on women in terms of how difficult it is" is incredibly milktoast feminism even if its pushing the boundries in a movie that is essentially a toy ad that lasts 2 hours.
I don't know what kind of media you think does not allow Escapism and its so absolutely drenched in political content that is impossible to enjoy.
Most emmy noms went to Succession, a shakespearean tale of rich brats picking on each other for father approval and Last of Us, a zombie show about a father daughter found family that shows humans are the worst threat and not the zombies. Neither seems incredibly political.
Videogames this year, top of the crop were Baldur's gate 3, Zelda and Spiderman 2. One is a DnD campaign about power, world domination and brain washing aliens. Another is Ganon is back, you are the hero go make a car and kill him and the last one is Spiderman saves new york from the same guys he has fought since the 1960s.
What is this escapism that existed in the 90s that no longer exist and where is the political undercurrent in all mainstream media that makes it so hard to escape into?
I don’t know if that’s Disney’s problem, overall—Turning Red, Elemental, Encanto, and Raya and the last Dragon are all recent Disney movies with female leads who had interesting character arcs. Not all had love interests, but most the main character was too young. Raya could have, but she lives in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and anyway I don’t think the movie had room for another subplot.
Was there even a "message" in "Wish" ?? I enjoyed the movie, but it was terrible from a plot perspective and almost entirely vapid.
I don't think there were many messages in other recent Disney movies I enjoyed (ex: Little Mermaid live action, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) either.
Its more like, Disney's Phase4 / Phase5 of Marvel was just poorly written. They ran out of creative juice for the movies after they spent it all on the TV Series. Disney oversaturated us with Marvel and needs to cut back down to stories we can actually follow.
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Star Wars didn't seem to have much "messaging" either in my view. It was just two directors arguing over the plot with the audience getting confused in the middle. Is Ray a nobody? Or is she the grand-daughter of someone important? Well, both, because the directors / creative team behind Episodes 7/8/9 couldn't decide and didn't have the heart to make a decision.
That's just crappy storytelling. "Messaging" isn't the issue as much as the writers just suddenly started to suck recently.
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As far as I'm aware, the best recent Disney movie, critically, was the one with "obvious messaging". Elemental, which was about how to think about immigrants and how their culture/strength/weaknesses play a role in cities.
> 2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster".
And rightly so. The so-called special effects in those superhero movies are really getting exhausting. What's the point of having superpower yet battling like a peasant in medieval times? What's the point of having super intelligence yet making so many illogical decisions? What's the point of having the best technologies on earth yet having your tribe living in dirt and fighting with rhinos and using duet to elect your leaders? I can even tolerate such plot holes if the movies have good stories or interesting characters, but do they?
2023 had a lot of big-budget bombs. Ant-Man, Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Transformers, The Flash, Fast X, Blue Beetle, Elemental, Shazam!, and the Marvels all underperformed somewhere on the scale from "disappointment" to "disaster".
On the other hand, aside from the massive big-budget hits of Barbie and Mario, there were also a number of mid-budget films that did very well: John Wick 4, Sound of Freedom, Five Nights at Freddy's, Cocaine Bear and M3GAN all exceeded expectations.
So it's hard to interpret this as the "middle class" of movies disappearing. I'd say it's the opposite, in fact. People have gotten sick of the big-budget crap that follows the same formula (note how most of those bombs are superhero movies). It's really the big-budget films that are falling apart.
Its not 10 outright failures in a row, but they've been doing poorly for most of 2023.
Keep in mind that ~2X the official production budget is roughly the minimum threshold for a movie to break even, after factoring in marketing and the theater take:
Elemental was a modest success earning $495.9M against a $200M budget.
The Little Mermaid maybe barely broke even at $569.6M against a $297M budget.
Indiana Jones bombed hard, earning $384M against a $300M budget.
The Marvels is trending towards about $200M against a $274.8M budget.
Wish opened terribly this weekend, pulling in $49M in its first weekend against a $200M budget (will likely finish between $120-150M)
Edit: Forgot about Haunted Mansion, earning $117.5M against $150M.
> Not surprised this is happening. Disney has had 10 major film bombs in row.
Which were they? The last Disney movie I think I saw was Elemental and that ended up doing pretty well in terms of money and reviews.
There are plenty on non-IP based movies, targeted at Gen-Z/Alpha, and made by large studios that have underperformed this year.
Elemental and Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken immediately come to mind.
Yeah, the audience score is in no way an accurate measure of quality because it is provided by a self-selected group of people who both paid for the movie and went online to rate it. The end result is that a lot of movies viewed as failures will have high audience ratings as long as they can reach some small passionate audience. Just looking at some current movies:
Blue Beetle: 78% critics, 92% audience
Gran Turismo: 63%, 98%
Elemental: 74%, 93%
Meg 2: 29% 73%
Haunted Mansion 38%, 84%
Indiana Jones: 69%, 88%
Little Mermaid 67%, 94%
Those audience scores are not "more accurate" in any way. People who are forced to see these movies like them less than people who chose to see it.
There also really isn't anything currently that fits into "the political correctness / marketing budget of the movie" claim of OP. It seems like they are just buying into cultural war nonsense. The closest I can find is Barbie and its critic score is 5% higher than the audience score, so not much of a gap.
Right. But take, for example, Warner Bros. Discovery.
$40 billion in revenue yearly, $50+ billion in debt needing servicing, annual gross profit $13 billion, Market cap $32 billion. They aren't exactly the world's healthiest company.
What's the plan? "World-class" Cost-cutting and price hikes, everywhere. Even if it's multiple 95%-finished movies (Scoob! Holiday Haunt, Batgirl), send them to the shredder for the tax write-off if their success is uncertain. Taking risks or releasing anything that possibly won't be a hit, is not affordable at the moment.
What about Disney? Disney+ is losing $4 billion every year, and now has a lawsuit ongoing about whether the projections of profitability were ever reasonable. And it has also become apparent to investors that the content deluge and the expectations it set has caused massive damage to Marvel, as well as Pixar's Box Office profits. Pixar's Elemental, for example, just had the second-worst box office opening after the original Toy Story... except that Toy Story opened with 28 years less inflation, and on a Wednesday. The good news for Disney is that Elemental has had quite a recovery, even if it almost certainly won't break-even.
Now you've got this quibble with the Writer's Guild; at the same time that making new content to prop up streaming numbers has never been under more scrutiny, and the pocketbook has not been such a concern in years. You can afford to take a break - heck, you might have even been considering taking a break anyway; and by taking a break you can theoretically win a better deal with the Writers to save even more money in the future.
There are plenty of series and movies that use more-contemporary cultural values to mask bad-storytelling. I really don't see how Pixar is at fault for this, however. How is this relevant to the failures of The Good Dinosaur and Elemental, for example?
I think one reason why Pixars "decline" is more harshly felt is because the Pixar "style" is the only type of flagship animated feature Disney puts out nowadays.
It's not that Pixar has always been good, like any company there's been ups and downs, but because Disney themselves have also gone all in on 3D animated films[0] (and none of those really come close to what Pixar puts out; even the recent flop of Elemental is still a better movie than most 3D Disney movies of the past decade), all those movies get compared to each other in a much more direct manner.
Back in the early 2000s, it was pretty straightforward; Disney did the 2D animation, Pixar the 3D animation. It means that when Pixar or Disney puts out a stinker, its easily covered by the other. A sort of trade if you will.
Disney has kinda now ended up in a bit of a slump for the past decade (likely directly the fault of the Live Action Remakes they keep doing - it feels really uncreative), so the highs and lows of Pixar are that much more apparent.
They'll be doing fine. Elemental sucked, but it doesn't seem like it's a pattern for Pixars movie creation process. Not in the way that Shrek's poop humor ended up dominating DreamWorks for over a decade or how Despicable Mes "marketability" ended up ruining Illumination.
[0]: The last blockbuster 2D animated movie was the Princess and the Frog and according to Disney it didn't make enough money to continue making them.
Abstract stories about emotions is good though. Soul was a perfectly good movie.
And if you go over to the anime community, the kids are explicitly liking it because of the random emotional tangents (I'm looking at you Demon Slayer).
And a lot of the reason why people liked Puss in Boots: the last wish, was because of the existential crisis the protagonist faces upon confronting his last life.
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I don't think a movie like Elemental would hit very hard after Zootopia locked down the concept near perfectly. It seems ill-timed, we need a few more years to forget Zootopia before giving another rural vs urban different people's city romance with subtle nods to racism story.
Weird as it sounds, I would still describe the political message in Wall-E as more subtle than in Elemental, or even Strange World - another recent flop. Why is that?
Wall-E, although clearly and one sidedly in favor of environmentalist or conservationist causes, still describes the problem and the solution in fantastic terms. The entire planet being covered in skyscrapers of toxic trash may have some parallels to the present, but those are just parallels. The message you can take away from Wall-E is not a literal solution (planting plants to rejuvenate things ignores the complexity of real life ecosystems - just consider invasive species!). Instead, the message must be more abstract - something like "Care more about the environment."
The political situation in Elemental, by contrast, is barely abstract at all. There is a city, there are immigrants, and the elemental toothpaste commercial aesthetic is a thin veneer over real life racial and ethnic tensions. So any solution the movie suggests would be something that maps very closely to the real world.
Elemental is good. It's just the marketing was bad. The premise itself is generic and they didn't put the work I to the marketing to make it exciting. Despite that the actual movie is quite enjoyable.