102 min | PG | June 16, 2023 | Walt Disney Pictures
Fire meets water in a city built for the elements, and a shopkeeper’s daughter falls for the one boy she is supposed to evaporate. Pixar dresses up an immigrant-family story in periodic-table costumes. The allegory is heavier than the romance.
Ember Lumen runs the front counter of her father’s shop in a corner of Element City where fire people built their own neighborhood. She is the daughter of immigrants who crossed water and flame to start over. She is also slated to inherit the family store the moment her father retires. Then a city inspector named Wade floods into her basement and threatens the whole thing. Peter Sohn’s film uses its fantasy of living elements to tell a specific story about second-generation children who owe everything to parents who gave up everything.
Leah Lewis voices Ember as a young woman with a temper she cannot control and a future she never chose. Lewis plays the anger as fear wearing a louder costume. Mamoudou Athie voices Wade as a man who cries at everything and apologizes for none of it. The contrast works because Athie never makes the sensitivity a joke. Ronnie del Carmen voices her father Bernie with the stubborn pride of a man who built a life out of nothing and refuses to admit his body is failing.
Sohn directs from a script by John Hoberg, Kat Likkel, and Brenda Hsueh that leans hard on its central conceit. The animation team treats fire as a translucent surface where light passes through and color shifts with emotion. Ember’s flame deepens to blue when she calms and flares orange when she rages. The production design builds an entire transit system around the physics of the elements, with water canals for some citizens and dry paths for others who cannot touch them. The visual rules of the world carry more invention than the love story laid on top of them.
This is a handsome film about the cost of inheritance and the children who pay it. The romance follows a path you can chart from the first scene. The family material underneath it earns its weight. Sohn made a movie about his own parents and dressed it in spectacle, and the spectacle is the part that lasts.