TROY SLADE

Elemental is GREAT. fire and water fall in love in multicoloured, unworldly Pixar fable Here is a perfectly decent, personable family entertainment from Pixar, based around another of this studio’s oddly pedantic and algorithmically developed abstract high concepts: what if fire and water fell in love? It is also a star-crossed love story based on that most traditional of American themes: melting-pot diversity in the big city. The scene is another fabular alt-reality: Element City, a place of vivid colours and shapes like a toy held up in front of a newborn. Here, the creatures of the four elements – fire, water, earth and air – have come together to live, if not in harmony exactly, then a kind of boisterous acceptance. There is, however, a bigoted caste system that means that fire creatures are looked down on, maybe in the way the US’s northern European identities look down on people from hotter countries. Each of them comes from an old country where they were members of the only element-ethnicity. Bernie and Cindy Lumen (voiced by Ronnie Del Carmen and Shila Ommi) are hardworking first-generation fire immigrants who set up a store in the city’s Fire Town district. They have a smart, fiery-tempered teen daughter Ember (Leah Lewis), whom they hope will take over the business when they are gone.