Commentary: ‘Elemental’ Is Relatable Fantasy

Fantasy is such a vivid genre as it requires a healthy imagination to create vast worlds with unique characters and societies. This expands beyond traditional high fantasy of elves and goblins and can incorporate all sorts of worlds limited only by a given creator. Pixar handles this well as they’ve created fantasy worlds with cars, toys, and even emotions. What makes these worlds so special, though, is the ability to make them relatable even though they are so alien to us. It’s still possible to take real aspects of society and inject them into a fantastical world. And Pixar does this perfectly with their new release, Elemental.

The film is very similar to Walt Disney Animation’s Zootopia, which has a city broken up into many different parts based on the animals living a particular neighborhood. Elemental handles this by having different groups of society representing the elements: fire, air, water, and earth. Each lives in, essentially, segregated neighborhoods. The elements more or less get along because they have to in order to function in society. But they also tend to stick to their own as it just culturally makes sense.

This is a huge allegory for our own society. A lot of cultures tend to stick together because they have similarities. But that doesn’t mean those cultures have nothing learn from each other, which is exactly what the different elements are learning over the course of Elemental‘s story. Plus, the main character goes through a journey of trying to live her own life and not the life her parents plan for her, which is a separate issue from the elements’ cultural segregation. This coming-of-age story about tolerance and self-worth is extremely relatable to the human experience. And yet, it’s a story about sentient elements living in a science fiction city. This is how fantasy can still stretch the boundaries of imagination while also being relatable and poignant to the real world.