YMMV / Elemental (2023)

• Adorkable:
  • Wade is certainly highly emotional, but he's also a friendly, sweet-natured goofball with a hidden poetic side. Not to mention his incredibly dorky mannerisms when around Ember during their first date.
  • Ember also has her own adorkable moments when she gets flustered. Especially once she begins defrosting.
  • Also, to an extent, Clod. He's a cute earth elemental kid who tries flirting with Ember early on. While he's sad that she turned him down, it didn't stop him from looking for someone his age: a little fire girl who's just as cute and dorky as him!
• Alternate Aesop Interpretation:
  • DIY fixes should be a temporary thing until you can get a proper fix. Gale simply accepting Ember's glass fix for the leak rather than trying to get a professional crew to finish the job or replace it results in all of Fire Town getting flooded and Wade nearly dying.
  • One cannot be excused for being racist just because they're a minority. Burnie refuses to think anything but the worst of Wade and it leads to Ember's hesitation to be honest about what she's doing.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: Elemental had quite a lot going against it ahead of its release, due to a combination of marketing that did a very poor job selling the movie to general audiences to the point that the director himself, Peter Sohn, called out Disney’s marketing team for it, a plot that many dismissed as nonsensical and an imitation of Zootopia based on said marketing, Sohn's name having previously been the one that was (ultimately) attached to The Good Dinosaur (widely considered to be Pixar's weakest original film), and an overall perception that Pixar as a whole had been on a steady decline in relevance due to most of their movies going straight to Disney+ during the COVID-19 pandemic and the box office failure and tepid reception of Lightyear after the pandemic. It especially didn't help that the movie received mixed-to-negative reviews when it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, although the reception improved closer to release. When Elemental opened to Pixar's worst ever opening weekend (adjusted for inflation), it seemed that everyone's worries and predictions of box office failure were validated, which heralded a wave of articles and video essays declaring Pixar a dead company/brand that would never get a theatrical release again. However, positive word-of-mouth from those who did see it, pointing out that the movie was far better than its trailers made it seem, led to many audiences and the Pixar fandom giving the movie a second look. This combined with being released in a summer where family-friendly animated movies were scarce meant that in only a month's time, the movie that even Disney itself was writing off as a failure managed to become the studio's biggest box office success since 2019, proving Pixar could still put enough butts in theater seats to at least make a profit after three years of audiences getting used to Disney+ premieres and after the failure of Lightyear. It then became Disney+'s biggest premiere of 2023, earning 26.4 million views in its first five days on the service. It was later confirmed that the movie had 800,000 DVD Sales, 1.7 Million Digital Copies, and 60 Million Disney+ Views, as of October 5th, 2023. It was ultimately declared the most streamed movie of 2023.
• Awesome Music: "Steal The Show" by Lauv, which plays during a heartwarming montage of Ember and Wade dating and falling in love, and during the end credits.
• Base-Breaking Character: The appearance of Clod made the base broke even further. Mainly fans want him gone, while the others think he's cute and just let him show in One-Scene Wonder.
• Cliché Storm: One of the most frequent criticisms from both negative and positive reviews about the film are that the plot and setting as both a racism allegory and a Forbidden Love romantic comedy are incredibly well trodden and predictable. However, fans of the movie argue that doesn't detract from the movie's quality.
• Critical Dissonance: Has a 74% critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes, tied for third lowest scoring Pixar movie. Its audience score is a much more positive 93%. Audiences also gave it an A on CinemaScore. This is averted on Metacritic where the Metascore (58) and the user score (5.0) are both the second lowest for Pixar.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Wade planning to leave the city in order to cope with Ember breaking his heart? Utterly heartbreaking. Wade's uncle Harold giving him a parting gift in the form of a painting of him crying? Utterly hilarious.
• Fanon: Wade, even before a certain deleted scene was released, is often headcannoned to be bisexual. This skyrocketed after a deleted scene showed him blushing and getting enamoured over a male fire person named Dante.
• Friendly Fandoms: In Malaysia, the movie has one with the BoBoiBoy fandom, since the both the movie and animation have "elemental personification" characters.
• Genius Bonus: The fact that Wade and Ember can touch each other harmlessly because the steam coming off of Wade protects the rest of him from evaporating is more or less how the Leidenfrost effect works, proving that elements can mix together under the right conditions.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While the box performance in most countries ranged from underwhelming to solid once it started gaining word of mouth, the film became the highest-grossing Pixar film ever in South Korea, topping the box office for weeks and becoming a cultural phenomenon. The common theory is that, since the film was directed by a Korean immigrant, the film inserted cultural touchstones that heavily resonated with Korean audiences, mixed with valued themes such as determinism and family. Peter Sohn, by his own admission, felt his heart bursting with joy upon learning the news.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: The Windbreakers' Airball game became a rather beautiful reflection of the movie's success after a rather disappointing start.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: Even before the movie released, many people started to criticize the film for having a very similar premise to Pixar's previous projects, with "What if a fictional/inanimate things had feelings?". While some had already complained about Pixar (and Disney to an extent) having this problem in the past, the argument started to appear much more frequently with the Elemental's first concept art and trailer release, even among long-fans of Pixar, which brought the discourse of what their works should do.
• Memetic Badass: Due to all the viral marketing surrounding Clod despite being an Advertised Extra, he became an ironic Memetic Badass by many people. It came to a turn once the film started performing well at the box office, with people ironically praising Clod for saving the film from failure. This was helped by Cr1TiKaL's sarcastic worship of Clod, as well as an ironic fandom spawning in the /tv/ board of 4chan.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Waterboy and Firegirl.^ExplanationUnder these nicknames, Wade and Ember are often compared to the titular protagonists of the Flash game series Fireboy and Watergirl. Some even joke that they are Fireboy and Watergirl after transitioning.
  • Another common joke is comparing Wade to Osmosis Jones due to their similar appearances.^note Coincidentally, director Peter Sohn worked as an animator/storyboard artist on Osmosis Jones early in his career.
  • "I... like the word moist, okay?! It's who I am!"^ExplanationAn animation by Kevin Temmer called "The 3rd Act of Pixar's Elemental..." had gotten a sizable following, with some people mistaking it for an actual leak of the movie.
  • Accurately predicting the plot of the movie.^ExplanationPlenty of jokes, deridingly or otherwise, have spawned about how easily the plot can be predicted, due to how common the Star-Crossed Lovers plotline is in a lot of animated works. Notably, the Forbidden Romance aspect, Second-Act Breakup, Third-Act Misunderstanding, and the ending of the two sorting out their differences.
  • I now know that it could never work between us! Not because you're a child, but because you're an earth elemental.^ExplanationIn one scene, the earth elemental child Clod asks Ember out, but she rejects him by saying that "elements don't mix". Many people have pointed out how weird it is that it's his element and not his age that she objects to, which has led to Black Comedy memes portraying Ember as an openly racist child predator.
  • Clod got that rizz.^ExplanationAs part of their viral marketing, Pixar made a fake fancam promoting Clod using a scene of him flirting with Ember, but they quickly took it down when people noted the implication of a small child romancing an adult. Then people started reposting the clip making fun of their Totally Radical attempt at advertising the movie through a minor character, although often replacing the cheers with a Jump Scare, meme ending, boos, or stony silence.
  • The cloud lady.^ExplanationGale has gained a bit of an ironic following, due to the fact that she uses the exact same render in every single poster. Many fans have taken to editing her into other pictures.
  • Elemental Sweep.^ExplanationThe film opening to Pixar's worst ever (adjusted for inflation) box office numbers and being instantly written off as a flop, only to demonstrate excellent legs to the tune of earning just as much in its fifth weekend as its first, has caused people to semi-jokingly rally around the film as something that will very slowly become the highest grossing film of all time.
  • Steam baby.^ExplanationLots of fanart shows Wade and Ember having a child made of steam, a combination of fire and water. This is based on an actual early idea for a Sequel Hook.
• Moe: The younger versions of Ember and Wade are all absolutely adorable!
• Presumed Flop: Due to its abysmal box office opening, many against Disney love to label this movie a complete failure, ignoring how the film became a Sleeper Hit that eventually did make profit.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus of the film. While it's far from horrible and far better than the train wreck that people initially thought it was gonna be, it's still just a pretty average film with an average plot and a premise that, despite being a genuinely interesting take on Fantastic Racism, ultimately doesn't go anywhere in the end due to how play-it-safe the whole thing is.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: Some fans have accused the film of copying Zootopia, due to both works having similar looking cities and a Fantastic Racism allegory.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: It could've been potentially interesting to explore the culture and everyday lives of the earth elements and air elements in more depth; in the movie itself they're very much Out of Focus compared to the fire and water elements (at most, we get to see the air ball game played by air elements).
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Par for the course for Pixar, but the movie boasts some incredible visuals between the character designs/animation and the water, which borders on near photo-realistic at times.
• The Woobie: Ember grew up in a world that feared and hated fire people, she had to sacrifice so much of herself in order to pay back what she feels she owes to her parents, despite dealing with the inane and unreasonable demands of her family's store's customers, and her own self-isolation caused her to have no friends until she met Wade.

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