Hot take: Elemental

With that said, I should like to turn my tears into a small article, which shall serve as a lasting reminder of the wonderful experience I had during those two hours spent in a basement. Dive in.

Staying true to the principal of the four elements that together created the world - earth, wind, water, and fire - Pixar weaved together the scenery for our beautiful movie, a metropolitian city with towering glass skyscrapers, intricate museums and squares and beaches, and wondrous stadiums for citizens to enjoy - or at least, for citizens of the three elements: wind, water and earth. The fourth, fire, being the most reactive (and supposedly posed the most threat to citizens of the other three) lived in the outskirts of the city and usually were not seen within the metropolitian itself. (Right from here differences and prejudices sprouted - however, they deserved their own section, and thusly should be discussed at a later part).

It was in a shop among those very outskirt that our character, Ember, started here adventure. A fiery daughter of a shopkeeper and a psychic (fiery - fire - get it?), she strove with determination and all the composure she could muster to gain her father's approval and to shoulder the responsibility of managing the shop when he retired, believing that it was as much her passion as her daughterly duty - for her father displayed signs of illnesses of age throughout the movie, coughing constantly and quicklyh getting exhausted when repairing the broken water pipes.

Ah, but I must have gone heads over heels - the broken water pipes deserve an honourable mention; they set off, literally by busting themselves, the whole encounter of Ember and Wade. She, a shopkeeper struggling to get a grip on her composure as customers flodded the shop during Red Dot Sale day, but failed abysmally, retreating to the basement to unleash her temper; he, a building inspector, being flooded from his construction site right down to Ember's basement, forced through the water pipes, and emered in a shower of potentially lethal leakages (they were no more harmful than normal pipe water, mind you, but to Ember getting hit in the head by the water sprout equalled loosing a portion of her face). Indeed, if one were to choose a situation for an ideal first impression, a flooding basement would not be the first thing that came to mind. Having an inspector being flooded into your house, only for him to give you, like, thirty two diffrent kinds of fines, all the while crying very conspicously about the very fines and contributing to the flooding of your basement was no ideal scenario either.

And yet that was precisely how their adventure began, with Ember in hot pursuit after Wade the watery inspector, desperately trying to burn his documents so that her father's shop, one that took a lifetime to polish and hone, would not be closed down and demolished. Little did they know then, eh, that their journey would bring them together in ways unimaginable by anyone, any element, in the world?

And so it was, that fueleld by determination mingled with desperation, Ember embarked on the first train ever in her life into the city centre, in hot pursuit of Wade. Many times she nearly succeeded in taking the violation report out of his grasp; unfortunately, he was too slippery for her, and still submitted the document to the tree-like official in charge of processing the files before sending them to the higher members of the city hall. Ah, but Wade very nearly rolled back his report, and would have done so had it not been for the speed of the input system. He was shown compassion and sincerity - Ember, who he had just been acquainted with mere hours prior, who pursuited him throughout the entire metropolitan right to the town hall entrance - she opened her heart and expressed her desperation, her emotions, her feelings, right then and there, to him and with him. Her struggles to keep her father's shop open, her difficulties in living up to her family's tradition, they were received by Wade's kind heart. He sympathized with her, shed real tears for her, and tried the best he could to help her convince his airy boss, Gale Cumulus, to take back the demolition order.

Oh, they did, in a way, reached a pact with Gale: a promise to find the leakage in a dam system that has caused flooding and water pipe leakages in the fire outskirts, agreed outside the stadium they went to. Gale saw, even before Ember and Wade, that they were destined to each other, and having been moved by Ember's relentless determination (They literally had a shouting match during the game) and Wade's almost childish yet sincere enthusisasm - for it was he that aroused the spirit of the crowd and the players, prompting them to a table-turning victory - Gale finally softened. On the duo went, on a far-fetched search for a leakage that taken Wade himself weeks in futile scrounging. Perhaps it could be considered their very first date, with the hot air balloon that Ember molded from her fire and sustained, floating over the city and treading on dreamily through the starry night and the twinkling lights of the metropolitan? And did they not learn more about each other through their conversations, through opening their hearts?

So they did; and after using cement bags, and later on Ember's incredible ability to mold sand and create a wall of tempered glass, to save their own lives as well as block the leakage in the dam, Wade, in his ever awkwardly social (and somehow most innocently charming) way, asked Ember to accompany him in an afternoon in the city, where she discovered joy and happiness, and where she also discovered a fact, that she enjoyed looking at blurrily bright pictures of her and Wade in a photobooth (unsurprisingly, Ember's mother, a psychic, sniffed the scent of love long before she herself noticed it). Their connection was genuine, but more than that, it was selfless - each other's company they enjoyed and embraced, biological differences they cherished, and Ember's worries about her family was soothened by Wade's comforting words.

Their relationship was that of contrasting elements - literally - blending into each other, perfecting each other, fuelling passionate and relentless love. How many could proclaim themselves to possess the incredible chemistry between them? Even Ember's mother had to admit their intertwined destiny - Wade, using Ember's fire and his own watery composition to light an incensed wooden log, had proved to her mother that they were made for each other, just as the smoke from their logs weaved together, not wanting to be seperated.

But what Wade brought to Ember was not merely cheers and naivity; he brought her opportunity and clarity. Offering Ember a visit to his apartment on a family dinner, Wade not only moved her to tears - the very first ones in her existence - by pronouncing his affection, naively and sincerely, as he always was, he showed Ember that her talents with weaving glass into beauty and art could get her very far, could allow her to pursue her true dreams and wishes, could give her the happiness that she desperately and secretly wished she had - that was what her outbursts of angers had been trying to signal to her all along, and it had taken a silly water guy to help her recognise it. The very same offering for an internship in a world-class glassmaking company brought Ember the clarity she couldn't seek for herself: deep down, it had never been her desire to take over her father's workshop, but her determination to uphold her family tradition and her resonsibility to pay back her parents for everything they had done, emigrating from their ancestral fire land to the metropolitan, raising her with her best intentions always at their hearts.

Wade and Ember, they were made for each other, were they not? For, as they emerged from an adventerous visit to the museum housing Vivisteria flowers that could blossom in any of the four elements - the flower of her childhood, the one which she had been prevented to see because of her nature - him guiding her through an underwater tunnel using his boss Gale's air bubble to sustain her, did they not finally risked their own existence to touch each other, and find themselved blending perfectly? Didn't their hands, instead of getting extinguished or evaporating, grasped each other in tight embrace?

But alas, she turned away from Wade, angry and aggrieved. Her father, only wanting the best for his daughter but never having known her love for The Water Guy, as he called with contempt ("Elements don't mix!), and their grand re-opening of The Fireplace, now Ember's Fireplace, pulled her back to her reality: resonsibilities were for her to be shouldred, his father's lifelong dreams were for her to continue, the family's blue fire, painstakingly carried from her family's homeland, was for her to stoke; all that were supposed to be passed to her during the very grand-reopening. Everything was as perfect as it was possible, everone accounted for. Well, except one.

And look who decided to turn up and recite two hundreds reason why they shouldn't be together, yet state the one reason they should - because he loved her? Wade Ripple - awkwardly social, wriggly and wattery, easy to shed tears, yet in many ways possessing the strength and bravery normally assosciated with fire - professed right then and there his compassion for Ember. Ah, but for all the determination Ember possessed, she could not face telling her father right then and there her true dreams and wishes. No, it took her a flood that demolished the shop, made her attempt to preserve the family's blue fire (which would've failed without Wade's appearance in time, got trapped with him in an enclosed chamber and watched Wade illuminating her light one last time before getting evaporated - it took Ember a disastrous catastrophe that took away Wade, the one person she loved more than any other, the one person who stubbornly loved her even when she tried to not love back, to fully face herself and confessed to her father about her real wishes and her love for Wade.

Ah, but were they not destined to be with each other? They were; turns out Wade had seeped into the cracks in the stone ceilling. And once again, just like the time in Wade's apartment, Ember played the crying game, telling him the very stories he used, making him cry so as to drip back, and finally retold the lines of love that Wade recited to her - the final droplet of water, for Wade to come back into his original form. Their kiss sealed their fate.

Months later, Wade and Ember, now a couple, leave Element City so Ember can study glassmaking far away and travel the world together. Before she boards the ship, Ember bowed to her father just as he had done to his father, a gesture of asking for forgiveness and blessing. And this time her father returned the gesture - he had understood his daughter's love, he had known that she had found the right person to accompany her, to travel with her everywhere on the world.

And so the story ended. Similar elements may be compatible, but it takes two opposite elements to truly react.

The Elemental world weaved together by Pixar, in many ways, closely mirrors our own very humanly society. It was, and still is, biological diffrences that have been driving people apart instead of bringing them together to cherish their differences; just as different elements are conventionally non-mixable and elements hold their own grudges about each other, real-life humans sustain prejudices and discrimination, offering little support to those diffrent from what is considered conventional. And did the exclusion of the fire element from Element City, with all its water-based infastructure and transportation system, not remind one of the real-life seclusion of immgirants in foreign lands?

That said, as much as the Elemental World reflects the drawbacks of human society, so it does mirror progress. Far from perfection, yet its citizens are making brave attempts to open their hearts to embrace different elements - from Wade's airy boss to his family, right down to chance tourists who happen to end up at the same tower as Ember and Wade while they were going on a date - all are learning to perceive diffrences and peculiarities as things to celebrate and cherish, rather than jeer and shun. More than that, the very concept of Ember and Wade reflects openness towards diversity - one would, from the childhood game of Fireboy & Watergirl, expect fire, fierce and bright, to accomodate the image of a man, just as the fluidity, flexibility, emotion sensibility and shamelessness to express emotions and shed tears to belong to a woman - beating that toxic image and create diversity in personality and expressions, that's what I call progress. Also the very casual mention of Wade's sister and her girlfriend - that's really cool too, how such things are slowly being integrated into daily life and normalised, as it should be.

That's a movie for you. Honestly, I could go on with this article for several more days, but no amount of words is enough to express my enthusiasm for Elemental, as well as my hearty recommendation for everyone to go watch it - the movie has a lot of things for you to learn from. Really; it's as elementary as it could get!