"Crazy Element City": Pixar, danger!

June 17, 2023 | Total Issue 3269

Probably since "Toy Story 3", Pixar's wind reviews have gradually become "opinionated". In recent years, it has not only produced slightly routine assembly line works such as "Light Year" and "Summer Friendly Sunny Day", but also woven the imaginative "ceiling" of "Spiritual Journey" and "Dream Travel". Therefore, watching Pixar's works nowadays is more like opening a blind box, and you have to lower your expectations before watching the movie.

"Crazy Element City" is the kind of work that is difficult to satisfy after lowering expectations. After the film was screened in Cannes, it had an IMDB score of 6.3 and a Rotten Tomatoes index of only 63%.

This movie just looks at the translation and thinks it is a sequel to "Zootopia", but in fact, there is more than the name, the two films are very similar in the protagonist and world view setting. The protagonists of "Zootopia" are the neighboring foxes and rabbits on the food chain, and "Crazy Elemental City" is a natural fire and ice man, "Furnace Flame" and "Awa". They all live in a metropolis that seems to be all-inclusive, but in fact it is constantly ethnic conflict. (The following contains spoilers)

Pixar does not have many films that take love as a narrative theme, and most of the emotional lines are that the male and female protagonists see the truth in tribulation and help each other grow up in adventure.

But the adventure of Crazy Elemental City is absent. The movie does not set a difficulty/goal that the male and female protagonists must solve, the only difficulty is that the broken river channel can be repaired by the small flame of the furnace with heated sandbags.

A leak caused by a broken river is what prompted the two to meet. The adventure begins in the river, but also ends abruptly in the river. The crisis is imminent, but the main line of the story is not Xiaoyan Apo saving Elemental City, the relationship between the two lacks layers of progression, there is no process of mutual understanding, tribulation and true love. After reading it, I couldn't help but ask the sentence: How did you fall in love? Haven't you just met?

In fact, the characters of Stove Xiaoyan and Du Apo are very well matched, a water boy who can accommodate all things X a capable hot girl, but the boring story has abruptly worn out the sense of CP, so that the two of them are not as good as the pair of forest ice and fire people in the childhood mini-game.

Po is very similar to Xiaoyan's "ideal boyfriend" in the hearts of many girls. After the two met, Po has been Xiaoyan's "spiritual guide", teaching her to face her family, face her heart, and take her to see the rare scenery of Elemental City.

Po's boyfriend Li did score full marks, but this love did not make it more moving. As the saying goes, good love is not paid by one person, but by two tigers showing their belly. Just like in "Zootopia", Nick the fox is also the spiritual guide of Judy the rabbit, but they can become one of Disney's most popular CPs, not only because Nick is "petted" with Judy.

In the process of not fighting each other, the fox rabbit gradually shares and heals the fragility in each other's hearts, and this relationship becomes irreplaceable. Po is also paying for Xiaoyan, but it is difficult for us to see his heart completely from the effort, and the impression of him after watching the film is more stuck in "tolerance" and "crying". As for why Po loves Xiaoyan so much, maybe he really hasn't seen the "glass woman".

"Crazy Element City" is more reluctant to dig into the urban background. Element City is a metropolis that accommodates the four elemental groups of "water, fire, earth and air" at the same time, the prosperity of the city can hide dirt and dirt, is the natural growth soil of conflict and conspiracy, the four elements are very different, each other's character and lifestyle, is a story text with great space for excavation, but the movie is only used as the background of the love of ice and fire people.

There are not many imaginative wonders of the film about Element City, and I have to say that the part of Xiao Yan jumping and changing color on the ore in the trailer is the most amazing part of the elemental imagination.

In recent years, the Asian theme has risen in Hollywood, and personal growth in Asian families has frequently become a topic written in mainstream movies, such as Pixar's "Metamorphoses of Youth" last year, which is about the reconciliation between a Chinese adolescent girl and her mother.

The exclusionary Fire Tribes in "Crazy Elemental City" and the Aquatics who live in mansions in the city center are just like the opposition between Asian immigrants and local American residents. However, the film does not focus on portraying the various unbearable and irreconcilable contradictions of ethnic conflicts, and it has also been completely watered down with the reunion of Xiaoyan and Po.

Another core conflict in the film is "Xiao Yan's resistance to the profession arranged by his father". This reflects the inheritance of occupations in East Asian families.

At the heart of intergenerational conflict, Asian audiences generally have a high degree of empathy. But the solutions to family problems in "Youth Metamorphosis" and "Crazy Element City" seem to scratch their boots. In "The Metamorphosis of Youth", Meimei finally no longer cares about the state of the red panda and "accepts the imperfect self"; In "Crazy Elemental City", Xiaoyan finally "opens his heart to his father" and accepts a job in the city center given by Awa's family. In contrast, the intergenerational conflicts and self-reconciliation that East Asian adolescent girls face during adolescence are much more vivid and tragic.

However, it is still difficult to expect Pixar to make a growth story that is more in line with the physique of Chinese babies.

The two directors of "Metamorphoses of Youth" and "Crazy Element City" are Asians who immigrated to the United States at a young age, and they write about their own growth difficulties and what they see and feel in other places. East Asian audiences want to see more resonant adolescent stories, or pay more attention to and encourage our own creators.

【Text/Kwai Chung】