Summary
Pixar has run out of ideas so is now making films about elements, what’s next a feature length film about a cup of coffee.
So I went into this with low expectations, like basement level low expectations. I had seen the trailers and I thought that the film just looked like generic animated pap that repeated the same few life lessons all animated films do over and over again in an effort to entertain kids in the summer. However, there was far more to it than that and I would argue that this film has one of Pixar’s most developed and engaging emotional cores and that the romance between its leads is the sweetest one I have seen from the studio in years. I left this film blown away by how much it made me feel and yes I was a little bit emotional at the end.
What I would say about this film, and this is where I believe this film has gone majorly/wrong, is that it shouldn’t be about elements. At its very heart this is a film about worlds colliding, as cliché as that is, and of immigration with the latter playing a key role throughout the plot and informing a number of character relationships. I think this film would have been a triumph if it had just been exactly the same but swapped out the elemental characters for human characters and had it been an animated film about a grown up child of immigrants falling in love with someone from outside her community with the two helping each other grow. Now I can think of a pretty obvious reason this wasn’t done, as it may be viewed by some as too political and Disney might have had a panic thinking how is that going to play in Middle America, but I think if they had done that I would be giving this film a 5.
Overall, a hell of a surprise buried under some needless nonsense.
4/5
Pros.
The romance
The emotional core of the story
The inter-character relationships in a non-relationship sense
It is genuinely effecting
Cons.
The use idea of it being elements just doesn’t work at all
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Another Millennial Reviewer 
I was so sure this was going to be a negative review from the way it opened! 🙂 I haven’t heard great things about this overall but I’m a big kid, I’ll watch anything Disney or Pixar put out.
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