2023-06-22 11:36:48
Film “Elemental” in the cinema
When the poor fire girl gets involved with the rich water guy
Status: 23.06.2023 | Reading time: 3 minutes
Opposites that attract: Ember and Wade
What: 2023 Disney/Pixar
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In the cinematic fairy tale, our world is truly made for everyone: The immigration parable “Elemental” is an incredibly bold creation that only Pixar can come up with. The director also uses his own family’s experiences in it.
Peter Sohn, the director of the latest Pixar film “Elemental”, is not called Sohn, but Soeun. His father, a refugee from the South Korean dictatorship, came to New York in 1971 with $150. He rented an apartment in the Bronx for $75 and bought a mobile food stand for the rest.
He started selling pretzels for a quarter apiece. He had to give half of it to the Greeks, who ruled the pretzel business in the Bronx. He saved every penny until he could open a grocery store in a hovel. It took a while.
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Now his son has made a film in which a family leaves their devastated home and moves to a skyscraper city that looks a lot like New York. It’s not a city that welcomes them. She is built for earth beings. And for air creatures that look like drifting clouds. And for water beings, whose human outlines constantly change like water.
But not for fire creatures, whose redhead consists of licking flames, as well as the thin legs and arms. You have to see these animated beings, they can hardly be adequately described. It’s – once again – an incredibly bold creation that can only come from Pixar.
“Elemental” is basically an illustration of the saying that fire and water don’t mix – actually. They are personified by the fire girl Ember Lumen and the water boy Wade Ripple: he the child of rich, art-loving parents, she the child of poor immigrants who open a grocery store in a ruin. Peter Sohn’s film negotiates the immigration question, he negotiates the class question, but he does so using the cipher of the mutually exclusive elements.
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This city is a friendly environment for those who built it and a hostile environment for those who are new to it. Boats travel through canals that stand on stilts like the tracks of an elevated railway. But the bow wave from the boats spills out of the channel and spills onto people moving beneath it: potentially lethal for fire beings.
There are dozens of such fantastic details that go into the fire/water logic, from transportation to food to home furnishings; at one point, Wade tastes a hot fire dish and blushes like a westerner who has poured too much gochujang over his chicken. And yes, a few harmless sex jokes made it past Disney’s family censor.
Ultimately it all comes down to the question of whether Ember and Wade, whether old-timers and newcomers, whether fire and water can go together or must remain separate forever. The film “Elemental” pleads for the philanthropic, the fairytale solution.
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In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is required, since the providers of the embedded content as third-party providers require this consent [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (which can be revoked at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can withdraw your consent at any time via the switch and via privacy at the bottom of the page.
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