Beauty and the Beast (2017), dir. Bill Condon
Mulan (2020), dir. Niki Caro
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breathe. 💜
Dumb rant about art incoming. Something about the character design of Pixar's Elemental disgusts me. It's not just the generic belongs-in-a-heartburn-ad look of the female lead or the Generic Pixar Man (water edition) look of the male lead. It's the fact that the earth and air elementals, almost all of whom are background characters, are stout and large and round, while the protagonists (and certain water and fire side characters) still follow the obnoxious Pixar "slimthick woman, slightly out-of-shape (but not fat!!) man" rule of character design. And they're all just so, so boring. Look at this and try to feel anything.
For those wondering: I saw the movie today out of sheer curiosity. It was well-animated, and the voice actors were great. Literally everything else I said about the movie before seeing it was true.
If you trained an AI on the Pixar formula, it would make this movie. I can't believe so many people on this site are saying they cried several times. The only great emotional beat in the movie was Ember returning her father's bow, and that felt like something that would have been more impactful in a movie about actual immigrants from a specific culture, not an "immigrant everyman" culture that haphazardly combines a dozen distinct ethnicities into one fictional group of Fire People(tm). Bonus points for the very creative fictional language used by Fire people, though. I actually really liked the introduction of the movie.
A story about gentrification in this setting could have been really interesting, actually -- the hostility of a city built for the upper class of water encroaching on a historically Fire-owned district, literally making it uninhabitable for them! -- but that's not what we got. Elemental is literally just a muddled "working class immigrant meets rich boy" love story. Opposites attract, etc.
Anyway, it's about a 5.5/10. A very bland story, but the visuals were nice even if I disliked the character design. Jingle some more keys in front of my face, Pixar.
