I pity nearly everyone involved in my screening of Elemental that I attended this evening. I pity the mother sat next to me with two young children who were clearly enjoying the film, but occasionally distracted. I pity the people my age or maybe a few years younger behind me who were invested but occasionally distracted. I pity the adults around me who were seemingly invested but occasionally distracted. It is a taxing process to see every blockbuster as some kind of representation of the cultural moment, but I am afraid I must do so again, because Elemental is a very perplexing movie. It is a film that takes notes in its worldbuilding from Japanese immigration that has some race jokes with about as much subtlety as Ice Cube’s “Black Korea.” It is a romance that is largely not a romance, and an adventure film about fixing a dam and city ordinance handshakes - until it isn’t. It is a movie much like Turning Red where it ends with everything being destroyed but nothing actually being lost. It is visually vibrant with little imagination beyond its initial conceit of ‘what if there were four tribes of basic elements’ living in a city so much like New York I considered putting in some kind of glib joke about it secretly deserving the title Wet Side Story. It is the first original idea Pixar has been able to put into theaters since the start of the pandemic and is preluded by a short based on Up, which baffled the younger audience members around me who likely had no idea how they were supposed to be feeling watching an old curmudgeon talk to a dog with an odd dialect.

Elemental is a movie compromised by the current financial state of the industry, where movies have less time to make less money and leave less of an impact. Indeed, I walked into a theater for a 6:50 screening and saw a posted paper that Across the Spider-Verse seats were full until the screening at 10:00. Elemental and its box office neighbors ‘Transformers in the 90s’ and ‘remember when Nicolas Cage was supposed to be Superman in the 90s?’ have to appeal to as many demographics as possible in order to be seen as worthwhile investments in a business model that will surely collapse before we ever get Avengers 5. Therefore Elemental has to be a lot of things. A colorful adventure for children that’s clever enough for adults to sit through with themes for overthinkers like me to attempt to parse. But dear God, we can do better than this, right?

As Ebert put it, children can always tell when they’re being punked. Adults have better things to do than have movie studios punking their children, and children deserve not to be punked! This story about a first generation immigrant coming of age should not have to depend on every family of four in America seeing it to uphold a decades old animation studio, but that’s the trap we find ourselves in. Filmmakers want to tell interesting stories but know their audience is never large enough for the intersect between the story they want to tell and the amount of tickets that need to be bought for them to continue working in the industry. Movies deserve to have niche appeal, and genres deserve to exist in more than one mode. But in an age where every science fiction movie is based on one of two comic books and every fantasy movie only takes itself seriously if it’s being marketed to children, we are running out of room.

The movies also aren’t changing with the times. Elemental was getting comparisons to Zootopia from the jump with its whole ‘elements don’t mix’ angle. The characters hold a mindset that feels very millennial, which is not a thing that kids anywhere from six to sixteen years old can relate to. Children in the twenty first century have a whole new set of desires, anxieties and intelligences. As Pixar creates fake audience reaction videos for a character barely in the film while they also shill out an announcement of their first nonbinary character, who has two lines in the film, I struggle to answer the query of who this is all for.

The worst thing about it all is that Elemental is kind of good? Like, good enough to be remembered fondly but not good enough that I forgot I saw it on that particular discount Tuesday by the weekend, much like the bespectacled juror in 12 Angry Men. Even as I try to write passionately about how we can do better, making the film the subject of this piece I’m sure gives it an aura of a pervasive shrug. Thus, I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead. We can do better.