You know what one of my least favourite film criticisms ever has been recently? "Elemental is like if A.I. tried to write Zootopia", and it's not because I think Elemental is a masterpiece. I won't deny that there are some similarities, even I have said that Elemental had some elements of Zootopia in its story. However in comparing the two, I find that the comparison is not actually all that apt, and honestly I feel this way about other movies we compare to each other, like Coco and The Book of Life, or Antz and A Bug's Life, because really most of the similarities just seem superficial. This begs the question, why do we make this comparison? Why do we say this about Elemental, but Zootopia doesn't get unfairly compared to anything it is similar to?
Full disclosure, I did not re-watch Elemental for this blog, I watched and did a review of Zootopia, but most of what I bring up about Elemental will be from memory and what I have previously written about it. We'll see if this was a good idea at the end, eh?
I think the big reason this comparison is made is that, at their cores, both movies are ostensibly about prejudice. I say "ostensibly" because, while the movies may have themes of prejudice, I don't think I would say that Elemental is entirely about prejudice. Zootopia was a crime mystery where the main villain was directly targeting a certain group of people for a twisted sense of justice for another certain group of people. Zootopia focused entirely on different characters experiences with prejudice, from how the police academy is not made for mammals for Judy and how the police don't really treat Judy like an official cop, to how Nick took the prejudice he faced and let it shape him into the person he is. I said in my review that Zootopia was not necessarily strong in its themes of prejudice, but the truth of the matter is that Zootopia is about prejudice. Which is where I feel Elemental throws a lot of people off, because while there is the theme about prejudice in the movie, Elemental is not about that, it is a love story.
Elemental is about the daughter of immigrants befriending and falling in love with someone outside of her... let's be real here, outside of her ethnicity. Partially, it was inspired by the director, Peter Sohn's, upbringing as the child of Korean immigrants, and by his marriage to someone that was not Korean. It is also about Ember finding her own identity, struggling with what she wants and what she believes her family wants. While the movie does show that there is prejudice in this world, and what prejudice Ember and her family faced, the movie is not about prejudice at the very core. If I'm being honest, while I did say that Elemental ultimately had a weak story, I think the fact they didn't focus on the prejudice angle actually made it a bit stronger.
My big problem with Zootopia was that, because it seemed that they wanted to make Zootopia an ideal instead of a metaphor, the actual themes of prejudice were not very strong. I mentioned ways they could have made the theme stronger while still keeping within the restrictions of a PG rated film. However, because Zootopia looks too much like a utopia, the theme doesn't come across. I remember one of the complaints about the movie was that it was very blatant and obvious, and I think a lot of that is that they rely more on telling us than showing us. There are instances where we are shown the prejudice, like when Judy has to do cop training in an environment that was not built to suit her limitations, but even then we still have to be told that "Bunnies have not been cops before", and rather than show other hopeful lagomorphs and rodents alongside Judy only for Judy to be the only one to actually become a cop, she is the only one there alongside larger mammals.
Meanwhile, Elemental opens with Ember's parents being denied housing, while her mother is pregnant, and has a scene in the middle where Ember and her father are denied entry into a location because of their race. One voice in the crowd even yelled at them to "go back to Fireland", which I find amusing because when you think about discriminated ethnicities, you may not tend to think about Ireland, though the Irish were arguably one of the most discriminated against people in American history. What is the point about this anecdote? Well, the fact that, even though Ember and her family are heavily coded as south east Asian, it shows that anyone could have been this fire family, from Korean and Japanese immigrants to those told to go back to Ireland. This shows the clear difference between Zootopia and Elemental, Zootopia dealt with racism, Elemental dealt with xenophobia.
I think at the end of it all, Zootopia and Elemental are two very different stories, I mean obviously, one is a buddy-cop crime mystery, the other is a romantic-comedy drama. Yet, because both movies discuss themes of prejudice with non-human characters, people would start to expect the newer movie to be like the older movie. However, even within their discussion of prejudice, both movies are different, as Zootopia wanted to present its setting as an ideal, as if this is what is possible if we work together. You see it in the world that it integrates mammals of all sizes, to the point where a lot of the themes of prejudice are lost. Elemental meanwhile showed its setting as a metaphor, as a "this is what our real world actually is". I will not argue that Elemental is the better movie, nor will I argue it has stronger themes of prejudice, what I will argue is that the story and themes of Elemental are ultimately different to that of Zootopia. Comparing the movies to each other only does a disservice, it disregards the story that Elemental is telling, and the story that Peter Sohn wanted to tell, while also putting expectations on Zootopia that I don't think it can live up to.
I'm not going to sit here and force you to prefer Elemental over Zootopia, honestly they're both kind of on a similar level of enjoyability for me. I will however, say that if you're going into Elemental expecting Zootopia, you're going in for the wrong reason. I don't particularly think either movie is all that strong, but both are enjoyable for what they are. I do get why people make the comparison, but at the end of the day, saying that "Elemental is like A.I. rewrote Zootopia" clearly demonstrates to me that you did not actually pay attention to either Elemental or Zootopia. Even before I rewatched Zootopia, I knew that the two movies were not alike at all. So maybe, we can indeed have more than one story where the theme is prejudice, especially if those two stories are as different as they can be.
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